AI X-risk is a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox

TBH, I feel like it can be summed up as "well, there might be a Great Filter somewhere along the line, therefore no paradox".

Yep, this is the point, we should not be surprised to see no aliens, because there is a likely great filter, or at least a serious mistake in our calculations, and thus it doesn't matter that we live in a large universe, since there is quite a high probability that we are just alone.

But they also isolate the Great Filter to "Life is ridiculously rare", and they also isolate the Great Filter to the past, which means that there's not much implications other than "life is rare" from seeing no aliens.

To your first point:

You're saying it seems more likely that FTL is possible than that every single civilization wipes itself out. Intuitively, I agree, but it's hard to be sure.

I'd say it's not that unilkely that P(doom before K2) > .9999. I know more about AI and alignment than I do physics, and I'd say it's looking a lot like AGI is surprisingly easy to build once you've got the compute (and less of that than we thought), and that coordination is quite difficult. Long-term stable AGI alignment in a selfish and shortsighted species doesn't seem impossible, but it might be really hard (and I think it's likely that any species creating AGI will have barely graduated from being animals like we have, so that could well be universal). On the other hand, I haven't kept up on physics, much less debates on how likely FTL is.

I think there's another, more likely possibility: other solutions to the Fermi paradox. I don't remember the author, but there's an astrophysicist arguing that it's quite possible we're the first in our galaxy, based on the frequency of sterilizing nova events, particularly nearer the galactic center. There are a bunch of other galaxies 100,000-1m light years away, which isn't that far on the timeline of the 14b universe lifespan. But this interacts with the timelines for creating habitable problems, and timelines of nova and supernova events sterilizing most planets frequently enough to prevent intelligent life. Whew.

Hooray, LessWrong for revealing that I don't understand the Fermi Paradox at all!

Let me just mention my preferred solution, even though I can't make an argument for its likelihood:

Aliens have visited. And they're still here, keeping an eye on things. Probably not any of the ones they talk about on Ancient Mysteries (although the current reports from the US military indicates that they believe they've observed vehicles we can't remotely build, and it's highly unlikely to be a secret US program, or any other world power, so maybe there are some oddly careless aliens buzzing around...)

My proposal is that a civilization that achieves aligned AGI might easily elect to stay dark. No Dyson spheres that can be seen by monkeys, and perhaps more elaborate means to conceal their (largely virtual) civilization. They may fear encountering either a hostile species with its own aligned AGI, or an unaligned AGI. One possible response is to stay hidden, possibly while preparing to fight. It does sound odd if hiding works, because an unaligned AGI should be expanding its paperclipping projects at near light speed anyway, but there are plenty of possible twists to the logic that I haven't thought through.

That interacts with your premise that K2 civilizations should be easy to spot. I guess it's a claim that advanced civilizations don't hit K2, because they prefer to live in virtual worlds, and have little interest in expanding as fast as possible.

Anyway, I should drag my head out of this fun space and go do something more pragmatically useful. I intend to help our odds of survival, even if we're ultimately doomed based on this anthropic reasoning.

Pardon my ignorance; I don't actually know what SIA and SSA stand for.

Yes, if one is in a simulation, the Fermi Paradox is easy, and there likely to be some fuses against excessive computational demands, one way or another (although, this is mostly a memory problem, otherwise it's also solvable by the simulation inner time being slowed with respect to the external time; this way external observers would see a slowdown of the simulation progression, and if the counterfactual of being able to "look outside, to view some of the enveloping simulation" were correct, that outside thing would be speeding up)...

My mental model of this class of disasters is different and assumes a much higher potential for discovery of completely novel physics.

I tend to assume that speaking in terms of ratio of today's physics knowledge to physics knowledge 500 years ago, there is still potential for a comparable jump.

So I tend to think in terms of either warfare with weapons involving short-term reversible changes of fundamental physical constants and/or Planck-scale-structure of space-time or careless experiments of this kind, resulting in both cases in a total destruction of local neighborhood.

In this sense, a singleton does indeed have better chances compared to multipolar scenarios, both in terms of much smaller potential for "warfare" and in terms of having much, much easier time to coordinate risks of "civilian activities".

However, I am not sure whether the notion of singleton is well-defined; a system can look like a singleton from the outside and behave like a singleton most of the time, but it still needs to have plenty of non-trivial structure inside and is still likely to be a "Society of Mind" (just like most humans look like singular entities from the outside, but have plenty of non-trivial structure inside themselves and are "Societies of Mind").

To compare, even the most totalitarian states (our imperfect approximations of singletons) have plenty of fractional warfare, and powerful fractions destroy each other all the time. So far those fractions have not used military weapons of mass destruction in those struggles, but this is mostly because those weapons have been relatively unwieldy.

And even without those considerations, experiments in search of new physics are tempting, and balancing risks and rewards of such experiments can easily go wrong even for a "true singleton".

whoops.