Does Artificial Intelligence Explain the Fermi Question?

Science fiction has been exploring advanced machine intelligence and its consequences for a long time now, and it’s now being bruited about in service of the Fermi paradox, which asks why we see no intelligent civilizations given the abundant opportunity seemingly offered by the cosmos. A new paper from Michael Garrett (Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics/University of Manchester) explores the matter in terms of how advanced AI might provide the kind of ‘great filter’ (the term is Robin Hanson’s) that would limit the lifetime of any technological civilization.

The AI question is huge given its implications in all spheres of life, and its application to the Fermi question is inevitable. We can plug in any number of scenarios that limit a technological society’s ability to become communicative or spacefaring, and indeed there are dozens of potential answers to Fermi’s “Where are they?” But let’s explore this paper because its discussion of the nature of AI and where it leads is timely whether Fermi and SETI come into play or not.

A personal note: I use current AI chatbots every day in the form of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and it may be useful to explain what I do with them. Keeping a window open to ChatGPT offers me the chance to do a quick investigation of specific terms that may be unclear to me in a scientific paper, or to put together a brief background on the history of a particular idea. What I do not do is to have AI write something for me, which is a notion that is anathema to any serious writer. Instead, I ask AI for information, then triple check it, once against another AI and then against conventional Internet research. And I find the ability to ask for a paragraph of explanation at various educational levels can help me when I’m trying to learn something utterly new from the ground up.

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