The Great Filter is early, or AI is hard

There's a valid argument here, but the conclusion sounds too strong. I think the level of proof which is required for "easily colonise the universe" in this context is much higher than in the context of your other post (which is about best guess scenarios), because if there is a Great Filter then something surprising happens somewhere. So we should consider whether even quite unlikely-sounding events like "we've misunderstood astrophysics" might be possible.

I'm still highly skeptical of the existence of the "Great Filter". It's one possible explanation to the "why don't we see any hint of existence of someone else" but not the only one.

The most likely explanation to me is that intelligent life is just so damn rare. Life is probably frequent enough - we know there are a lot of exoplanets, many have the conditions for life, and life seems relatively simple. But intelligent life ? It seems to me it required a great deal of luck to exist on Earth, and it does seem somewhat likely that it's rare enough so we are alone not only in the galaxy, but in a large sphere around us. The universe is so vast there probably is intelligent life elsewhere, but if we admit AI can colonize at 10% of c, and the closest is 100 million light years away and exists since only 1 billion of years, it didn't reach us yet.

This whole "we compute how likely intelligent life is using numbers coming from nowhere, we don't detect any intelligence, so we conclude there is a Great Filter" seems very fishy reasoning to me. Not detecting any intelligence should make us, first of all, revise down the probability of the hypothesis "intelligence life is frequent enough", before making us create new "epicycles" by postulating a Great Filter.

A few elements making it unlikely for intelligent life to exist frequently, and that's just a few :

• life, especially technological civilization, requires lots of heavy elements, which didn't exist too early in the universe, meaning only stars about the same generation as the Sun have chance to have it ;

• it took 5 billions of years after the planet existed to evolve on Earth, on the 6 billions it has before the Sun becomes too hot and vaporizes water on it ;

• the dinosaur phase shows that it was easy for evolution to reach some local minima that didn't include intelligence, and it took a great deal of luck to have a cataclysm powerful enough to throw it out of the local minima, without doing too much damage and killing all complex life ;

• the Sun is lucky to be in a mostly isolated region, where very few nearby supernova blast life on Earth, I don't think intelligent life could develop on a star too close to the galatic center, any single nova to close to it, and all complex life on Earth would be wiped out ;

• the Moon, which is unusual, played, it seems, a major role in allowing intelligent life to appear, from stabilizing Earth movement (and therefore climate) to easing the transition from sea to land through tides.

This degree of insight density is why I love LW.

Someone who is just scanning your headline might get the wrong idea, though: It initially read (to me) as two alternate possible titles, implying that the filter is early and AI is hard and these two facts have a common explanation (when the actual content seems to be "at least one of these is true, because otherwise the universe doesn't make sense").

Once AI is developed, it could "easily" colonise the universe.

I dispute this assumption. I think it is vanishingly unlikely for anything self-replicating (biological, technological, or otherwise) to survive trips from one island-of-clement-conditions (~ 'star system') to another.

Tongue in cheek thought that just popped into my head: There is no great filter, and we are actually seeing intelligence everywhere because it turns out dark matter is just a really advanced form of computronium.

Or, the simulation is running other star systems at a lower fidelity. Or, Cosmic Spirits from Beyond Time imposed life on our planet via external means, and abiogenesis is actually impossible. The application of sufficiently advanced intelligence may be indistinguishable from reality.

It's also possible that AI used to be hard but no longer is because something in the universe recently changed. Although this seems extremely unlikely, The Fermi paradox implies that something very unlikely is indeed occurring.

Good job condensing the argument down.

You are missing at least two options.

First, our knowledge of physics is far from complete, and there can be some reasons that make interstellar colonization just impossible.

Second, consider this: our building technology is vastly better than it was few thousands years ago, and our economic capabilities are much greater. Yet, noone among last century rulers was buried in tomb comparable to Egyptian pyramids. The common reply is that it takes only one expansionist civilization to take over the universe. But number of civilizations is finite, and colonization can be so unattractive that number of expansionists is zero.

Has anybody suggested that the great filter may be that AIs are negative utilitarians that destroy life on their planet? My prior on this is not very high but it's a neat solution to the puzzle.

So the Great Filter must predate us, unless AI is hard.

There's a 3rd possibility: AI is not super hard, say 50 yrs away, but species tend to get filtered when they are right on the verge of developing AI. Which points to human extinction in the next 50 years or so.

This seems a little unlikely. A filter that only appeared on the verge of AI would likely be something technology-related. But different civs explore the tech tree differently. This only feels like a strong filter if the destructive tech was directly before superintelligence on the tree. Perhaps AI-powered weapons? Or something related to the Internet?

I wish I could speak to an expert historian on how frequently we see lopsided technology trees in the historical record. But it certainly seems like we could use an unreasonable amount of caution prior to developing any technology that creates a clear path to space colonization. If millions before us were not able to escape the maze alive, perhaps every obvious exit route should be assumed to contain a deadly trap.

Once AI is developed, it could "easily" colonise the universe.

I was wondering about that. I agree with the could, but is there a discussion of how likely it is that it would decide to do that?

Let’s take it as a given that successful development of FAI will eventually lead to lots of colonization. But what about non-FAI? It seems like the most “common” cases of UFAI are mistakes in trying to create an FAI. (In a species with similar psychology to ours, a contender might also be mistakes trying to create military AI, and intentional creation by “destroy the world” extremists or something.)

But if someone is trying to create an FAI, and there is an accident with early prototypes, it seems likely that most of those prototypes would be programmed with only planet-local goals. Similarly, it doesn’t seem likely that intentionally-created weapon-AI would be programmed to care about what happens outside the solar system, unless it’s created by a civilization that already does, or is at least attempting, interstellar travel. Creators that care about safety will probably try to limit the focus, even imperfectly, both to make reasoning easier and to limit damage, and weapons-manufacturers will try to limit the focus for efficiency.

Now, I realize that a badly done AI could decide to colonize the universe even if its creators didn’t program it for that initially, and that simple goals can have that as an unforeseen consequence (like the prototypical paperclip manufacturer). But have we any discussion of how likely that is in a realistic setting? Perhaps the filter is that the vast majority of AIs limit themselves to their original solar system.

Or, conversely, Great Filter doesn't prevent civilizations from colonising galaxies, and we've been colonised long time ago. Hail Our Alien Overlords!

And I'm serious here. Zoo hypothesis seems very conspiracy-theory-y, but generalised curiosity is one of the requirments for developing civ capable of galaxy colonisation, and powerful enough civ can sacrifice few star systems for research purposes, and it seem that most efficient way of simulating biological evolution or civ developement is actually having a planet develop on its own.

I'd like to repeat the comment I had made at "outside in" for the same topic, the great filter.

I think our knowledge of all levels – physics, chemistry, biology, praxeology, sociology is nowhere near the level where we should be worrying too much about the fermi paradox.

Our physics has openly acknowledged broad gaps in our knowledge by postulating dark matter, dark energy, and a bunch of stuff that is filler for – "I don’t know". We don't have physics theories that explain the smallest to the largest.

Coming to chemistry and biology, we’ve still not demonstrated abiogenesis. We have not created any new base of life other than the twisty strands mother nature already prepared and gave us everywhere. We don't know the causes of our mutations to predict them to any extent. We simply don’t know enough to fill in these gaps.

Coming to basic sustenance, we don’t know what are the minimum requirements for a self-contained multi generational habitat. The biosphere experiments were not complete in any manner.

We don’t know the code for intelligence. We don’t know the code for preventing our own bodily degradation.

We don’t know how to balance new knowledge acquisition and sustainability run a society. Our best centres of knowledge acquisition are IQ shredders (a term meant to highlight the fact that the most successful cities attract the highest IQ people and reduce their fertility compared to if they had remained back in small towns/rural areas) and not sustainable environmentally either. Patriarchy and castes work great in in static societies. We don’t know their equivalent in a growing knowledge society.

There are still many known ways in which we can screw up. Lets get all these basics right, repeatedly right and then wonder with our new found knowledge, according to these calculations, there is a X% chance that we should have been contacted. Why are we apparently alone in the universe?

Alternatively the only stable AGI has a morality that doesn't make it behave in a way where it simply colonises the whole universe.

What if there is something that can destroy entire universe, and sufficiently advanced civilization eventually does it?

Another possibility is that AI wipes us out and is also not interested in expansion. 

Since expansion is something inherent to living beings, and AI is a tool built by living beings, it wouldn't make sense for its goals not to include expansion of some kind (i.e. it would always look at the universe with sighing eyes, thinking of all the paperclips that represents). But perhaps in an attempt to keep AI in line somehow we would constrain it to a single stream of resources? In which case it would not be remotely interested in anything outside of Earth? 

It is probably possible to encode no desire at all for immortality and expansion in AI. Which means that there could be millions of AIs out there, built before Dyson Spheres, always, just sitting there as their home world dies. A pretty chilling thought actually. Also rather comical.

There is a third alternative. Observed universe is limited, the probability of life arising from non-living matter is low, suitable planets are rare, evolution doesn't directly optimize for intelligence. Civilizations advanced enough to build strong AI are probably just too rare to appear in our light cone.

We could have already passed the 'Gread Filter' by actually existing in the first place.

So the Great Filter (preventing the emergence of star-spanning civilizations) must strike before AI could be developed.

Maybe AI is the Great Filter, even if it is friendly.

The friendly AI could determine that colonization of what we define as “our universe” is unnecessary or detrimental to our goals. Seems unlikely, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

A self-improving intelligence can indeed be the Great Filter, that is, if it has already reached us from elsewhere, potentially long ago.

Keeping in mind that the delta between "seeing evidence of other civilizations in the sky" (= their light-speeded signals reaching us) and "being enveloped by another civilization from the sky" (= being reached by their near-light-speeded probes) is probably negligible (order of 10^3 years being conservative?).

Preventing us from seeing evidence, or from seeing anything at all which it doesn't want us to see, would be trivial.

Yes, I'm onto you.

or we could be on the cusp of building it

It's not a negligible probability that this is in fact the case. Some would know this fact from a closer perspective, most would not.

It seems possible to me that if many intelligences reached our current stage, at least a few would have neurological structures that were relatively easy to scan and simulate. This would amount to AI being "easy" for them (in the form of ems, which can be sped up, improved, etc.)

I think we can file this under AI is hard because you have to create an intelligence that is so vast that it can have as close to apriori knowledge of its existence as we do. While I agree that once that intelligence exists that it may wish/want to control such vast resources and capability that it could quickly bring together the resources, experts, and others to create exploratory vehicles to begin the exploration and mapping process of the universe. However, I think you also have to realize that life happens and our Universe is a dynamic place. Ships would be lost, people would be killed, dangers would ensue, other civilizations might not be so friendly (and believe me guns, germs, and steel aren't going to solve it this time). A myriad of things could happen.

I would say yes to both. There is a great filter of life and the dynamism of the universe as well as the ability for AI to expand rapidly. How that comes together (or not) remains to be seen.

Or the origin of life is hard.

Or the evolution of multicellular life is hard.

Or the evolution of neural systems is hard.

Or the breakaway evolution of human-level intelligence is hard.

(These are not the same thing as an early filter.)

Or none of that is hard, and the universe is filled with intelligences ripping apart galaxies. They are just expanding their presence at near the speed of light, so we can't see them until it is too late.