AI as the Great Filter

[rjshae]

AI may be to blame for our failure to make contact with alien civilizations

Could AI be the universe's "great filter"—a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilizations? This is a concept that might explain why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has yet to detect the signatures of advanced technical civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy.

The great filter hypothesis is ultimately a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. This questions why, in a universe vast and ancient enough to host billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not detected any signs of alien civilizations. The hypothesis suggests there are insurmountable hurdles in the evolutionary timeline of civilizations that prevent them from developing into space-faring entities.

It's a pretty depressing concept, and one that is of growing concern as AI is now making rapid gains in the economy.

If alien life is artificially intelligent, it may be stranger than we can imagine

We human beings may be near the end of Darwinian evolution – no longer required to become the fittest to survive – but technological evolution of artificially intelligent minds is only just beginning. It may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence. If this happens, our species would have been just a brief interlude in Earth's history before the machines take over.

That raises a profound question about the wider cosmos: are aliens more likely to be flesh and blood like us, or something more artificial? And if they are more like machines, what would they be like and how might we detect them?

[ocpaul20]

There are plenty of examples of the public encountering aliens and military whistleblowers have reported encounters too. They may not all be carbon-based but some probably are and some are probably part biological and part mechanical.



What has AI got to do with contacting alien life since it looks as if we have done that already? It is just that some people dont want to acknowledge it and talk about it sensibly.