IABIED and The Fermi Paradox: while reading IABIED I noticed something that confused me. The book seems to argue that we’re on one of two paths. Option 1 is humanity barrels ahead with AI development, creates a misaligned ASI, and dies. Option 2 is humanity pauses AI development, hopefully solves alignment, then creates an ASI sometime a bit farther into the future. Which means that unless some other disaster befalls us, ASI from this point on is inevitable.
My confusion stems from how this interacts with the Fermi Paradox. If the book’s take is true, humanity will eventually create ASI, and that ASI will eventually spread throughout the universe (or at least throughout the galaxy), since either it or us will want to expand as far as possible. But if that’s true, why hasn’t another ASI already done so? It seems like following the conclusion of the book means that the reason we don’t find other life like us is that life like us is exceedingly rare—there must be at least one giant bottleneck in our past that most life doesn’t get through that we did.
IABIED and The Fermi Paradox: while reading IABIED I noticed something that confused me. The book seems to argue that we’re on one of two paths. Option 1 is humanity barrels ahead with AI development, creates a misaligned ASI, and dies. Option 2 is humanity pauses AI development, hopefully solves alignment, then creates an ASI sometime a bit farther into the future. Which means that unless some other disaster befalls us, ASI from this point on is inevitable.
My confusion stems from how this interacts with the Fermi Paradox. If the book’s take is true, humanity will eventually create ASI, and that ASI will eventually spread throughout the universe (or at least throughout the galaxy), since either it or us will want to expand as far as possible. But if that’s true, why hasn’t another ASI already done so? It seems like following the conclusion of the book means that the reason we don’t find other life like us is that life like us is exceedingly rare—there must be at least one giant bottleneck in our past that most life doesn’t get through that we did.