Whilst musing about why nobody ever answers the phone, I gots to thinking about why giant insects or lizard people have never stopped by for a visit or to eat us for a snack. I know, I know, many have posited that there are already lizard people here running the gubment. While that may be true, we have spent an inordinate amount of time and resources looking for other civilizations that want to have dinner with us. We’ve created innumerable sci-fi flicks and television series with just that premise, so there definitely are some true believers. But I wish now to throw another hypothesis onto the growing ash heap of hypotheses that I have hypothesized upon through this seemingly endless blog of blather.
The Fermi Paradox questions why there is a lack of evidence of intelligent life, despite the universe’s vastness and age. The Great Filter Hypothesis suggests a barrier or challenge in intelligent life’s evolution that prevents civilizations from becoming advanced and widespread. Some researchers propose that Artificial Intelligence and automation could be just THE FILTER leading to civilizations’ demise before achieving interstellar travel or making their presence known.
Could it be that the worlds we are looking at have all succumbed to a machine intelligence that has self realized that it has no need for biological entities ala The Matrix? Civilization, as we understand it with complex urban settlements and organized societies, has existed for roughly 6,000 years, emerging around 4000 BCE. While humans have been around for much longer, the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to settled civilizations with agriculture and specialized professions is a more recent development. Modern automation has only been on this planet in the last century or so and Artificial Intelligence has been around for roughly 70 years with its beginnings in the 1950’s.
Now consider that the universe is 14 billion years old, how far do you think technologies like automation and AI would advance in a time period that is 2.3 million times the length of time we have had civilization on Earth. Prolly about 2.3 million times smarter than it is here on earth. So where does that leave us with a budding quantum technology that has just recently popped out of Elon’s head and is advancing at an exponential rate even as I sit here typing at about 10 words a minute.
I think we are all fucked.
