Please stick with me for a moment. I haven’t gone off the deep end or witnessed any UFOs in my backyard.

If the likelihood of advanced life in the universe is so high, why don’t we have evidence of its existence? This is the Fermi paradox, and one astrophysicist has a new theory. A new paper by astrophysicist Michael Garrett proposes a theory that advanced AI might be the great filter that makes advanced technical civilizations in the universe rare. So, as these alien civilizations create artificial superintelligence (ASI), this technology eliminates them because their goals aren’t aligned. You know, that old chestnut. We’ve now ported AI doom scenarios to the cosmos.

I’ll acknowledge that there is a non-zero chance that Garrett’s theory is true. It’s a bit more science fiction than a potential reality for me, but let’s take the question the paper poses and use it for a thought experiment. Is AI acting as a great filter that advanced civilizations can’t get past? Possibly, but for a different reason than improper alignment leading to their extinction. What if the AI and its alignment weren’t the problem? What if life was the problem? Let me introduce a new theory that I feel is more plausible than ASI destroying intelligent life through elimination.

A New Theory: Entertainment

Let’s start by using the assumptions made from the paper itself.

“We start with the assumption that other advanced technical civilisations arise in the Milky Way, and that AI and later ASI emerge as a natural development in their early technical evolution.”

What if AI ruined these civilizations in a different way? Instead of eliminating them, a perfectly functioning and aligned ASI system could remove the capabilities and ambition of the species that created it. Free from not having to toil away (or work as we’d refer to it), life shifts to entertainment over exploration. I use the word entertainment here, but I mean this as whatever form gratification might take for the species.

Life throughout the cosmos may very well prefer simulation to reality.

Life throughout the cosmos may very well prefer simulation to reality. After all, why explore the universe with all of the dangers, hardships, and time commitments as a member of a collective crew when you can explore a simulation of the universe as a swashbuckling hero? Why wait decades or centuries for gratification when you can immediately get it? It could be that more immediate forms of gratification trump all else, not only on Earth but also through the cosmos. This means that gratification through simulation could very well be a civilization’s version of soma.

It’s possible that once truly capable AIs take care of the heavy lifting of keeping civilization going, civilization loses its fundamental sense of identity, which we would call humanity. This condition ushers a retreat inward instead of an expansion outward. A byproduct of this movement could fuel a lack of interest in procreating, and unless the technology keeps them alive indefinitely, they could end up dying out. To me, this is far more likely than rogue AIs exterminating their creators on every planet that has a form of ASI.

Many here on Earth would consider this scenario a utopia and state that this is the goal. But as with all utopias, they mask dystopias. What if some fundamental catastrophe happens, and the civilization needs to flex its cognitive resources to solve it? There wouldn’t be any. This civilization would be lost as it is forced to deal with problems it has never encountered without the systems it relied on and desperately needs skills it has never developed. A perfectly aligned AI system isn’t the end of the story and brings challenges of its own.

Imagine us discovering these new worlds and finding them abandoned, devoid of biological, intelligent life but filled with their remnant technology, humming along as if nothing happened. It would appear as if the non-intelligent life were intelligent. Maybe even as if plant life constructed their supercomputers. In a sort of way, if aliens visited our planet devoid of humans, it may appear as though cows constructed skyscrapers.

If you think this couldn’t happen, that some part of the population of alien species would maintain an independent spirit, I’m not so sure. I said in a previous post that we can’t seem to view the past without the lens of the present, and we can’t envision the future without using the same lens. This framing affects our thinking. Like on Earth, AI doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it exists alongside many other technologies. These technologies will shape and impact the population before the arrival of ASI, so think about things like social media and video games here on Earth.

Earth

I’m not trying to humanize aliens, but you’d have to assume that an intelligent species with the motivation or need to explore the universe and try and find life on other planets would share some attributes with us. Even attributes like curiosity, ambition, and necessity would be at least three traits we’d have in common. So, let’s use our humble corner of the galaxy for a moment.

Let’s assume that AI delivers on all its promises and people don’t have to work. What next? How would people spend their time? There is a romantic view that we’d all become philosophers and artists living a life of leisure and peace, but this isn’t humanity’s destiny. This narrative is a concoction being marketed to us under the guise of progress to temper unease. The fact of the matter is that generative AI today is devaluing these creative enterprises to a point where nobody will benefit from them in the future.

There’s no doubt that if AGI/ASI arrived tomorrow and nobody had to work, many people, possibly most people, would choose entertainment along with other mindless, time-wasting activities like swiping and scrolling. People would still create content, but more for attention than money. However, there would still be some who would maintain their curiosity and want to explore the cosmos.

By the time ASI arrives, we won’t be the same people we are today.

Tomorrow is easy to imagine, but what about 20 years or more? The technology we have today and the technology in development in the short term will change us to a point where we may not recognize ourselves at this time. This has already happened in my lifetime.

By the time ASI arrives, we won’t be the same people we are today. The technology that fills the gap will bring more entertainment, change our values and habits, and bring far more cognitive offloading. This is a massive recipe for transformation that may alter humanity’s trajectory as our focus and goals shift before the arrival of AGI and ASI. While we worry about AI alignment, we miss the possibility that maybe it’s us humans who need to be aligned.

In a previous post, I mentioned that this is how we get to the world of Idiocracy. So it could be that all of these alien civilizations took the Idiocracy route, prioritizing entertainment and losing ambition for answering the big questions about the cosmos. Ultimately, they may not care if they are alone as long as they are entertained.

Besides, if ASI wanted humanity gone, it could just play the long game. We’ve been inventing ways to make ourselves extinct for quite some time. Maybe entertainment is one of those ways.

Conclusion

Is my theory an explanation for the Femi Paradox? I have no idea. I know it’s more probable than the extinction scenario, even here on Earth. A perfectly aligned system brings challenges of its own, and I’m writing this as a cautionary tale for our species. While we search for technological progress and a cure for hardships, we must ensure we put some guardrails around our humanity. Otherwise, we have a roadmap to where this leads: cows constructing skyscrapers.