Where Are All the Aliens: Does AI Explain the Fermi Paradox?

0:00Today on the AI Breakdown, we're asking whether artificial intelligence explains the Fermi paradox. Before that on the brief, a major government official is arguing that the next financial crisis could be caused by AI. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our Discord, our YouTube, and our newsletter. Is AI going to cause the next financial crisis? We're exploring that and more on the AI Breakdown Brief, all the AI headline news you need in five-ish minutes or less. Yesterday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler gave a talk at the National Press Club, and AI was right at the center of the discussion.

0:40Gensler, who is of course in charge of regulating securities in the public markets, is arguing that the rise of artificial intelligence might require a new set of regulations. Now specifically, he was talking about global financial stability, and what's important to know about regulators in DC when they talk about markets, there are two broad categories of concerns they have. One is consumer protections, in other words, ensuring that people aren't falling for scams or being defrauded, and that they have the right information to make responsible financial investing decisions. And then secondarily, there are concerns about financial stability.

1:12Now, day-to-day, regulators tend to spend a little bit more of their time on concerns of consumer protection because there are simply more context for it. But when it comes to what keeps them up at night, it's absolutely financial stability. That's been the case ever since the fallout of the global financial crisis. Given that, it was notable that Gensler said, quote, AI may heighten financial fragility as it could promote hurting with individual actors making similar decisions because they are getting the same signal from a base model or data aggregator. Current model risk management guidance generally written prior to this new wave of data analytics will need to be updated.

1:43It will not be sufficient. Now, it is certainly the case that a lot of people are experimenting with AI's use cases in public markets. A quick search through the chat GPT plugin store suggests that that's the case. And so what are we to make of Gensler's assertion that AI could be at the heart of the next financial crisis? On the one hand, sure, it's possible that to the extent that everyone starts getting their information from the same AI and starts making the same decisions because of it, there could be weird market dislocations that have some really bad effects. The flip side, and this is for those of you especially who aren't in the Bitcoin or crypto space, Gary Gensler is the big government-er's big government-er.

2:21This is a guy who has spent his entire tenure at the SEC both trying to expand the power of that organization as well as trying to increase his own political cachet. And it's not just me saying that as a Bitcoin or crypto partisan. Democrat Richie Torres in December called Gensler a politician pretending to be a regulator and recently went even farther and called for an investigation into the SEC's weird practices, particularly when it comes to elevating a seeming sock puppet company to testify before Congress. Now, whatever the motivations, the reality is that once Gensler has decided that he wants to be part of a space, he's got to be part of it.

2:54Another more immediate impact might come from the fact that he has effectively issued a warning to publicly traded companies about slapping AI in their documents to try to get investors excited. Ultimately, the action that Gensler and the SEC try to pursue as it relates to AI is yet to be seen, but it's certainly something to keep an eye on. Staying in the regulatory realm for just a moment, the EU, ever since passing a draft of its AI Act, has been lobbying the rest of the world to try to get on board. This is, of course, part of the logic for regulators about trying to be first, is shaping the discourse for regulators in other jurisdictions.

3:26High-ranking EU officials have been pushing the US, but they've also been lobbying countries in Asia, with not much success, it seems. Reuters is reporting that EU officials have had meetings on governing AI with at least 10 countries in the region, including India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines. But according to sources close to the discussions, those talks are being met with a quote lukewarm reception. Reuters says, quote, many countries favor a wait and see approach or are leaning towards a more flexible regulatory regime. Put differently, while the EU may want to be the global leader in AI regulation, it appears that Asian countries just want to be the global leaders in AI.

4:01Speaking of AI in Asia, yet another Chinese internet giant has unveiled its own LLM. This time, it's the e-commerce leader JD.com, who has launched Chat Rhino with a focus on industrial use in industries including retail, logistics, finance, and healthcare. JD.com described Chat Rhino as having been trained on 70 % general data and 30 % native intelligence supply chain data. Indian companies as well are making major moves in the artificial intelligence space. India's consulting giant Infosys has signed a five-year AI deal that will spend up to$2 billion with the company. This is just weeks after having announced that they would be retraining and upskilling 30 ,000 engineers to focus on this new opportunity.

4:39Now, while the EU as a body may be lobbying other countries to get on board with its regulations, not every country in the bloc is totally comfortable subverting its own policy to the larger organization. CNBC reported today about a growing battle between France and Britain around where the home of AI in the European region will be. The specific context for it is that a conference in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that they would be spending 500 million euros in new funding to create new AI quote-unquote champions. As CNBC points out, that's about half of the UK governments previously pledged$1 billion into supercomputing and AI research.

5:14However, not everyone convinced that these numbers are enough. A former government cabinet minister, Sajid Javid, said, It sounds great, but it's nowhere near where we need to be. Bringing it back to the realm of cool new AI tools as we wrap up, One announcement that has people excited is that Wix has just launched its AI text-to-website generator. Now, Wix is far from the only company to have launched this type of service. In fact, I've covered a number of different website builders on this show. But of course, at the same time, Wix is operating at a different scale as a public company. So people are seeing this as the type of thing that's likely to find its way to a much wider audience than perhaps some of their smaller startup competitors.

5:50Markets certainly seem to like the announcement as Wix is up 10 % on the week. Finally, we wrap on something that I'm sure that we will give more coverage to in perhaps a dedicated form later on. But for the sake of awareness, Itamar Golan, the head of AI at Orca Security, writes, a malicious LLM-based tool known as WormGPT is rapidly gaining traction in underground forums. This tool empowers attackers to automate sophisticated phishing and BEC, business email compromise attacks, leveraging personalized fake emails to significantly enhance success rates. Itamar goes on, while LLM technology holds immense potential to humanity, it also requires substantial advancements in safety and security measures.

6:27So of course, anytime there is a new type of attack vector, especially when it comes to phishing, on a very basic level, we need to all raise our awareness and be more skeptical of everything that hits your inbox. That's going to do it for today's AI Breakdown Brief. If you enjoyed it, go tell one friend who's been looking for how to learn about AI. The AI Breakdown is the leading daily source of AI news that you can listen to, and I'd love for my listeners to bring the friends and people that they care about into our community as well. Thanks as always for listening or watching, and I'll be back soon with the main AI breakdown.

7:01Welcome back to the AI breakdown. Today we are talking about aliens, or maybe more accurately, the lack of aliens. Indeed, the surprising lack of aliens or evidence for aliens that we found despite the vastness of the universe. Now, this topic is more than a meme, and it has more to do with artificial intelligence than you might think. To begin, let's define the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox refers to the discrepancy between the high likelihood of advanced alien civilizations and the lack of evidence for advanced alien civilizations. Maximiliano Contieri wrote a piece for Hacker Noon that explained the Fermi Paradox in five different levels of difficulty based on the ages of the audience who were learning about it.

7:41Explaining it to a teenager, he said, The basic idea behind the Fermi Paradox is that the universe is vast. There are billions of stars and planets out there. Some of these planets might have conditions suitable for the development of life. If life is so likely to exist, why haven't we detected any signs of it yet? So where does this concept come from? In 1950, while eating lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, famed physicist Enrico Fermi was talking about alien civilizations during lunch with a number of his colleagues. The conversation had actually started on their way to lunch. There had been recently in the press a number of reports about flying saucers.

8:15And so on their lunchtime walk, the members of this conversation were discussing the likelihood of finding a way for material objects to move faster than the speed of light. The conversation moved on, but apparently Fermi sat brooding at the table, not really saying much. Until finally he blurted out a question which would become famous, but where is everybody? Now after Fermi, other astronomers and thinkers would take up this question. An example of that post-Fermi work is the Drake Equation. It's named after Frank Drake, who is an astronomer who was involved in the official search for extraterrestrial radio signals, and it was an attempt to calculate the number of civilizations that might be out there.

8:48In the equation, n is the number of civilizations that are currently transmitting signals, and n depends on seven different factors. The yearly formation rate of stars hospitable to planets where life could develop, the fraction of those stars with planets, the number of planets per solar system with conditions suitable for life, the fraction of planets suitable for life on which life actually appears, the fraction of planets with life on which intelligent life emerges, the fraction of planets with intelligent life that develops technologies such as radio transmissions that we could detect, and the average length in time that civilizations produce such signs.

9:17So basically what the Drake equation serves to show is just how many things have to align for an advanced civilization to be in a place where we might receive signals that they exist. Of course, difficult as that is, we're talking about a universe again with billions of galaxies. Now this discussion, not just of the Fermi paradox, but of aliens in general, is coming up a lot more recently. As the intelligencer put it, the past six years have been a roller coaster for the extraterrestrial minded in America. In 2017, the New York Times revealed that former Senator Harry Reid had previously snuck away$22 million in defense funding to investigate unidentified foreign objects.

9:51Since then, some Navy pilots have come forward to report frequent UFO sightings, while the Pentagon has revamped its investigation process in an effort to take the matter more seriously. Then this year we got a report from a former intelligence official that had a lot more meat on the bone than previous conspiracies. Investigators Leslie Keene and Ralph Blumenthal wrote, The former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the intelligence community inspector general extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.

10:20The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered a legal retaliation for his confidential disclosures. Other intelligence officials, both active and retired with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar corroborating information, both on and off the record. And even if one isn't inclined to take these claims seriously, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has introduced new legislation to create a review board to declassify documents that are related to unidentified aerial phenomena.

10:49This was just announced at the end of last week, and the New York Times wrote,

11:01Now, the bill appears to have bipartisan support, and it's being introduced as an amendment to the annual defense bill. So it's safe to say that aliens are on the brain. Now, the other reason that people are talking about it is that as he has been introducing his new XAI company, Elon Musk has specifically made mention of the Fermi Paradox as well. Now, there are two contexts for that conversation as relates to XAI. The first is that Musk and his team have said that the whole point of XAI is to help solve the universe's biggest mysteries. They want their AI to be maximally curious and truth-seeking, and they say that a big part of the motivation is to attempt to answer humanity's biggest unanswered questions.

11:42One of those for Elon is exactly this Fermi Paradox. In fact, if you listen to either of the Twitter spaces he held last week that related to XAI or AI in general, Elon sounded really perturbed that he had seen no evidence of aliens whatsoever. And in fact, that got to the second reason that the XAI conversation related to the Fermi Paradox. Some people think that artificial intelligence itself is the reason why the paradox exists. So what are potential answers to the Fermi Paradox? One possibility is alien isolation. In other words, that there are civilizations, but they are simply too far away to actually communicate with us.

12:17Another possibility is that interstellar travel is simply impossible. It's not just that advanced civilizations haven't gotten in touch with us, it's that they can't. Another possibility, wild though it is, is just that even with all those other planets out there, the conditions to create the type of complex life that humans are might just only exist on Earth, or at the very most, Earth in a very small number of places. Some point to the idea that we might not have the right technology to be able to communicate with aliens yet, even though they're trying. And some even suggest that aliens might be deliberately avoiding contact with us, either because they want to observe us or they want to avoid interfering with our development, something that some have called the zoo hypothesis.

12:53However, the more concerning possibilities include self-destruction, the idea that eventually advanced civilizations ultimately self-destruct either through nuclear war, environmental collapse, or some other means. And this gets to the idea of something that people have called the Great Filter. The Great Filter is an obstacle or challenge that stops civilizations from advancing beyond a certain point. So how does this relate to AI? Well, let's read a little blog post from February 25th, 2015 by a guy called Sam Altman. He was at the time of this post running Y Combinator and was about 10 months away from announcing OpenAI.

13:27The post was called Machine Intelligence Part 1. He starts, this is going to be a two-part post, one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what you should do about it. The first section, Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence, reads, Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen, for example an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate, but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe the way that a superhuman machine intelligence could.

13:55It's extremely hard to put a time frame on when this will happen, but it's also extremely hard to believe that it isn't very likely that it will happen at some point. SMI does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all. A more probable scenario is that it simply doesn't care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal, wipes us out. How can we survive the development of superhuman machine intelligence? It may not be possible. And here's the money quote which connects the dots for you guys. One of my top four favorite explanations for the Fermi paradox is that biological intelligence always eventually creates machine intelligence, which wipes out biological life and then for some reason decides to make itself undetectable.

14:30So just to be clear, right before he decided to start open AI. Sam Altman was blogging about his interest and openness to the theory that advanced artificial intelligence always kills advanced biological life, and that is why we don't have any evidence of aliens in the universe. This theory got another boost this year when a paper was published called Could AI Be the Great Filter? What Astrobiology Can Teach the Intelligence Community About Anthropogenic Risks. The abstract reads, where is everybody? The phrase distills the foreboding of what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox. The disquieting idea that, if extraterrestrial life is probable in the universe, then why have we not encountered it?

15:05This conundrum has puzzled scholars for decades, and many hypotheses have been proposed suggesting both naturalistic and sociological explanations. One intriguing hypothesis is known as the Great Filter, which suggests that some event required for the emergence of intelligent life is extremely unlikely, hence the cosmic silence. A logically equivalent version of this hypothesis, and one that should give us pause, suggests that some catastrophic event is likely to occur that prevents life's expansion throughout the cosmos. This could be a naturally occurring event, or more disconcertingly something that intelligent beings do to themselves that leads to their own extinction.

15:36From an intelligence perspective, framing global catastrophic risk within the context of the Great Filter can provide insight into the long-term future of technologies that we don't fully understand, like artificial intelligence. For the intelligence professional concerned with global catastrophic risk, this has significant implications for how these risks ought to be prioritized. Now this is a discussion that happens quite a bit on LessWrong, which is where a lot of the AI safety and risk people hang out. Interestingly, some in the less wrong community argue that it's unlikely for AI to be the great filter because they believe we would have seen signs of advanced intelligence taking over biological intelligence, just as we would see signs of the biological intelligence in the first place.

16:12In December 2012, economist Robin Hanson addressed this in a blog post called Today is Filter Day. He wrote, Let us remember one key somber and neglected fact. The universe looks very dead. Yes, there might be pockets of life hiding in small corners, but for billions of years, billions of galaxies full of vast resources, have been left almost entirely untouched and unused. While we seem only centuries away making a great visible use of our solar system, and a million years from doing the same to our galaxy, any life out there seems unable, uninterested, or afraid to do the same. What dark fact do they know that we do not?

16:41Yes, it is possible that the extreme difficulty was life's origin, or some early step, so that other than here on Earth, all life in the universe is stuck before this early, extremely hard step. But even if you find this the most likely outcome, Surely, given our ignorance, you must also place a non-trivial probability on other possibilities. You must see a great filter as lying between initial planets and visibly expanding civilizations, and wonder how far along that filter we are. In particular, you must estimate a substantial chance of disaster, i.e. something destroying our ability or inclination, to make a visible use of the vast resources we see.

17:13And this disaster can't be an unfriendly super AI, because that should be visible. And so we return to the question of where is everybody, and I'll posit it to you. Do you guys in the AI breakdown community think that the answer to the Fermi paradox lies in a great filter? And if it does, is it more likely to be something very early in the evolution of life on Earth? Or something much later, like the development of AI? For me, I find myself highly compelled by Tanner Nelson's recent tweet, where he wrote, Starting to worry that the solution to the Fermi paradox may be that intelligent species create super-intelligent AI, which then generates TikToks that no one can stop watching, and we all starve to death.

17:49That's going to do it for today's AI Breakdown. This is one where I would love to have you as part of our community conversation. Come join us on the AI Breakers Discord. I'll start a new thread for exactly this. You can find the link at bit.ly slash AI Breakdown. And until next time, peace.