The Fermi paradox takes its name from a 1950s visit by physicist Enrico Fermi to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. One day, as Fermi was walking to lunch with physicist colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York, one mentioned a New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens stealing public trash cans from the streets of New York. While dining later, Fermi suddenly returned to the topic of aliens by asking: “Where is everybody?”
Whereas not everybody agrees as to what Fermi was precisely questioning, the “paradox” has generally been interpreted as Fermi expressing his surprise over the absence of any signs for the existence of other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way. Because a simple estimate showed that an advanced civilization could have reached every corner of the galaxy within a time much shorter than the galaxy’s age, the question arose: Why don’t we see them?
Over the years that have passed since Fermi asked his question, dozens of potential solutions to the “paradox” have been suggested.
In particular, a few scientists have argued that the absence of alien signals is the result of a “great filter”—an evolutionary bottleneck impenetrable to most life. If true, this great filter is either in our past or in our future. If it’s behind us, then it may have occurred when life spontaneously emerged, for example, or when single-cell organisms transitioned to multicellular ones. Either way, it implies that complex life is rare, and we may even be alone in the Milky Way. If, on the other hand, the great filter is ahead of us, then most advanced civilizations may eventually hit a wall and cease to exist. If so, that too may be humanity’s fate.
Instead, we would like to propose a new way of thinking about the Fermi paradox. It stands to reason that there are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and processing power of organic brains. In fact, we may be close to those limits already. But no such limits constrain electronic computers (still less, perhaps, quantum computers). So, by any definition of “thinking,” the capacity and intensity of organic, human-type brains will eventually be utterly swamped by the cerebrations of artificial intelligence (AI). We may be near the end of Darwinian evolution, whereas the evolution of technological intelligent beings is only at its infancy.
Few doubt that machines will gradually surpass or enhance more and more of our distinctively human capabilities. The only question is when. Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil and a few other futurists think that AI dominance will arrive in just a few decades. Others envisage centuries. Either way, however, the timescales involved in technological advances span but an instant compared to the evolutionary timescales that have produced humanity. What’s more, the technological timescales are less than a millionth of the vast expanses of cosmic time lying ahead. So, the outcomes of future technological evolution could surpass humans by as much as we intellectually surpass a comb jelly.
But what about consciousness?
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