Super Intelligence would expand at near the speed of light, reaching us extremely fast. It would be unlikely for the window of time that we have telescopes and the window that the aliens are expanding towards us to overlap.

https://grabbyaliens.com/

Interesting that your model allows for super-intelligence but not faster than light travel.

I mean one of these is consistent with the known laws of physics and the other isn't. Seems reasonable to me.

Intelligence is consistent with the laws of physics but given our rudimentary understanding of it we have no idea if super-intelligence is. I'm defining super-intelligence as at least an order of magnitude increase in intelligence, not just "high IQ".

Intelligence is correlated with brain size, not just in humans, but also between species. No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain. Perhaps not even a moon-sized brain. The only real limit seems to be mass (we don't want the whole thing collapse under its own weight) and signal delay due to the speed of light.

> No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain

I think you'll find the speed of thought is much lower than the speed of light, I believe nerve impulses max out at about 120 m/s. The difficulty of supporting such a large mass of nerve tissue is also a problem. There is also the trouble of whether intelligence is purely electrically mediated or if it relies on the soup of hormones and molecular machinery of DNA and proteins for some of its functions. We also need to specifically consider the neocortex here since it is the only differentiating brain structure in animals with human intelligence. Other animals have much larger brains but no signs of human like abilities.

If you are suggesting we build an artificial brain then we need to wait at least a few more years if not decades to find out if that is possible. The current transformer models are quite advanced at language production and seem to have some simple reasoning abilities but they are very far from being intelligent.

I mean, we don't need to call our house or Moon sized AI "brain", but it seems clear that no laws of physics are preventing us from building something so intelligent that we are mere ants in comparison. The old Gods, while powerful, would pale in the light of its intelligence. A true God, hopefully a benevolent one. It doesn't seem many decades away.

Different. Super-intelligence is a plausibly reachable thing, a question of engineering. TIL is an uncertain thing, requires entirely new physics, and completely unknown tech.

Isn't that just "physics"?

Maybe the IAs that destroyed civilizations were just misaligned and didn't desire to survive after the achievement of their goal? Maybe all around the universe, millions of IAs have just killed everyone and stop their execution with the return message: World peace achieved.

For something to be an effective great filter, it has to happen 99.999999999...% of the time. Does that really feel true here?

It's a lot easier for me to believe maybe there's an intelligence where everyone just agrees. Like maybe they have full knowledge and things just... Are.

This has been my biggest gripe with all this great filter and alien talk. It always seems people personify whatever intelligent beings are out there with human characteristics.

Why is it that they have to war? Why is it they have to have economies? Why is it they have to do anything we do here?

It never made sense to me.

Same. Do you have any recommended readings that explore this idea?

Nope, I wish I did. Also interested.

Humanity will never have a higher opinion of itself when we finally meet another galactic empire…

And it’s a thick fog of organic molecules that dissolves entire planets on contact.

I do get a little laugh out of the “the aliens will deem us unworthy” stuff. Christianity called, it wants its mythology back!

AIs or SIs may well have optimization functions that don't permit them past the "Destroy all humans" phase into the "Harvest resources of nearby starsystems to make more paperclips" phase - They may well reach a local maxima, be unable to proceed, and burn out long before then. I would assume that most AI with a sufficiently bad optimization function as to destroy their creators would fall into that hole.

SETI is on the wrong track. They need to build a galactic range paperclip detector.

while we are in the AI stack, ie they are dependent on humans for power, hardware, maintenance etc. we will be fine. when the robots can do those though...