How about one where people destroyed the Internet, burned all books and killed all academics to impede the dangerous knowledge cut loose by Roko. In the preface the downfall of the modern world would be explained by this. The actual story then would be set in the year 4110 when the world not just recovered but invented advanced AI and many other technologies we dreamed about today. The plot would be about a team of AI supported cyborg archaeologists on Mars discovering an old human artifact from the 2020's, some kind of primitive machine that could be controlled from afar to move over the surface of Mars. When tapping its internal storage they are shocked. It looks like that the last upload from Earth was all information associated with the infamous Roko incident that lead to the self-inflicted destruction of the first technological civilisation over 2000 years ago. Sure, the archaeologists only know the name of the incident that lead a group of people to destroy the civilized society. But there's a video too! Some Chinese looking guy can be seen, panic in his eyes and loud explosions in the background. Apparently some SIAI assault team is trying to take out his facility, as you can hear a repeated message coming in from a receiver, "We are the SIAI. Resistance is futile..." He's explaining how he's going to upload all relevant data to let the future know that it was all for nothing...then the video suddenly ends. Instantly long instantiated measures are taken to sandbox the data for further analysis. In the epilogue it is then told how people are aghast at how the ancients destroyed their civilisation over such blatant nonsense. How could have anyone taken those ideas serious for that every kid knows that a hard takeoff isn't possible as there can only be a gradual development of artificial intelligence and that any technological civilization is merging with its machines rather than being ruled by them. Even worse, the ancients had absolutely no reason to believe that to create intelligences with incentive as broad as to allow for the urge to evolve is something that can be easily happen by failure, now people know that it has to grow and requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. And the moral of the story would be that the real risk is taking mere ideas too serious!
Maybe I'm generalizing from one example here, but every time I've imagined a fictional scenario where something I felt strongly about escalated implausibly into warfare, I've later realized that it was a symptom of an affective death spiral, and the whole thing was extremely silly.
That's not to say a short story about a war triggered by supposedly-but-not-actually dangerous knowledge couldn't work. But it would work better if the details of the knowledge in question were optimized for the needs of the story, which would mean it'd have to be fictional.
From a review of Greg Egan's new book, Zendegi:
(Original pointer via Kobayashi; Risto Saarelma found the review. I thought this was worthy of a separate thread.)