If advanced civilizations exist, where are their AIs? Even if they stayed at home, why haven’t their machines reached us? Unless they’ve killed everyone. Or maybe they haven’t been invented. Because to create an AI, you need a lot more than just hands.
To get to where we are today, we’ve already passed through several great filters: life existing at all → multicellular life → intelligence and hands → technology. Technology could have remained primitive, each tribe guarding their own secrets. But it didn’t. Because humans seem to have a trait extremely rare in nature. We trust each other. We trust strangers.
Money is totally bonkers, if you really think about it. It has no intrinsic value. It’s basically a promise. Yet we use it to buy things from strangers halfway around the world. We have to trust the system and we trust people we’ve never met. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma scaled. That kind of trust just shouldn’t work. And it doesn’t have to be money, other systems might do it differently. But trust is the backbone, the foundation needed to build anything complex in our society. Without it, we couldn’t build radio, rockets, or AI. Would we even have stone tools (which need trade), writing or even fire?
Other animals have trust, within kin groups or with others they know. But trust on the human economic level? Not a chance.
So maybe we’re not the only intelligent species. But maybe we’re the only ones who trust each other enough to build the kind of world that allows AIs to be created in the first place. Maybe we’ll find out for sure when we send our own AIs out to look.
<details> <summary>Disclosure: Writing Assistant Use</summary> I wrote this essay after discussing the idea with ChatGPT-4o, which encouraged me to publish it. All the ideas, structure and edits are mine, and everything was written manually in Word. I’m dyslexic, and I did get ChatGPT to give me feedback and perform spell checking, because otherwise… I’d be too embarrassed to publish it. </details>
The Trust Filter: A Hidden Step in the Fermi Paradox? (Or where are all the alien AIs?)
If advanced civilizations exist, where are their AIs? Even if they stayed at home, why haven’t their machines reached us? Unless they’ve killed everyone. Or maybe they haven’t been invented. Because to create an AI, you need a lot more than just hands.
To get to where we are today, we’ve already passed through several great filters: life existing at all → multicellular life → intelligence and hands → technology. Technology could have remained primitive, each tribe guarding their own secrets. But it didn’t. Because humans seem to have a trait extremely rare in nature. We trust each other. We trust strangers.
Money is totally bonkers, if you really think about it. It has no intrinsic value. It’s basically a promise. Yet we use it to buy things from strangers halfway around the world. We have to trust the system and we trust people we’ve never met. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma scaled. That kind of trust just shouldn’t work. And it doesn’t have to be money, other systems might do it differently. But trust is the backbone, the foundation needed to build anything complex in our society. Without it, we couldn’t build radio, rockets, or AI. Would we even have stone tools (which need trade), writing or even fire?
Other animals have trust, within kin groups or with others they know. But trust on the human economic level? Not a chance.
So maybe we’re not the only intelligent species. But maybe we’re the only ones who trust each other enough to build the kind of world that allows AIs to be created in the first place. Maybe we’ll find out for sure when we send our own AIs out to look.
<details>
<summary>Disclosure: Writing Assistant Use</summary>
I wrote this essay after discussing the idea with ChatGPT-4o, which encouraged me to publish it. All the ideas, structure and edits are mine, and everything was written manually in Word. I’m dyslexic, and I did get ChatGPT to give me feedback and perform spell checking, because otherwise… I’d be too embarrassed to publish it.
</details>