AI Might Be Why We Haven't Found Aliens
Our galaxy holds hundreds of billions of stars, and in more than sixty years of listening we have never heard from anyone. In 1965, a codebreaker who worked alongside Alan Turing predicted a machine that would be "the last invention" humanity would ever need. Sixty years later, the world's biggest companies are trying to build it, and some scientists now ask whether every civilization builds one... and whether that is why the sky is so quiet.
This is the story of the transformer, the scaling laws, the race to AGI, the researchers who disagree about all of it, and the Fermi paradox.
Chapters
Sources
- I. J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" (1965)
- Vaswani et al., "Attention Is All You Need" (2017)
- Rich Sutton, "The Bitter Lesson" (2019)
- Kaplan et al., "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models" (2020)
- Hoffmann et al., "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models" (2022)
- OpenAI, "Better Language Models and Their Implications" (2019)
- Morris et al., "Levels of AGI" (Google DeepMind, 2023)
- Chollet, "On the Measure of Intelligence" (2019) / ARC Prize
- Grace et al., "Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI" (2024)
- AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research
- Google DeepMind, "AlphaEvolve" (2025)
- METR, "Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks" (2025)
- CSER, "What if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion?" (Frontier AI Working Paper 2/2026)
- METR, "Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity" (2025)
- AI Futures Project, "AI 2027" (2025)
- Center for AI Safety, "Statement on AI Risk" (2023)
- Greenblatt et al., "Alignment Faking in Large Language Models" (2024)
- Anthropic, "Agentic Misalignment" (2025)
- OpenAI, "o1 System Card" (2024)
- Anthropic, "Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model" (2025)
- Robin Hanson, "The Great Filter" (1996)
- Michael Garrett, "Is Artificial Intelligence the Great Filter?" (Acta Astronautica, 2024)
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