Given a recent USA headline about how the new crop of incoming freshmen college students can't even read well enough to read a complete sentence, I had a sudden burst of inspiration. I believe I have solved a long-standing scientific problem.
It's the Fermi paradox: given how we think intelligent life evolved from sterile chemicals on a primordial Earth, and that there are billions of planets capable of the same sort of process, even if a tiny proportion of those potential sources did go on to bring forth intelligent life, there should be many - thousands, maybe millions - that *did* give rise to intelligent life.
The paradox is, given all these intelligent species out there, why have we heard from precisely zero of them?
There are lots of theories as to why this is. The most pessimistic ones tend to say that intelligent life inevitably does something to eliminate itself, (geologically) soon after becoming intelligent, so they aren't around long enough for them to send messages, or they do so for such a tiny window of time that it doesn't overlap with *our* tiny window. Causes: nuclear war, #environmental #catastrophe, etc.
I now believe that it's simpler: a society of intelligent life eventually invents #LLMs / "AI", and then deskills itself so rapidly in a race to the bottom of the effort-skill curve that they no longer exist, or at least not at a level to be capable of sending messages to us.
We're doing it now.
#AI #life #Fermi #FermiParadox #intelligence #wink