A headline of high strangeness, but amplified by a scientist who thinks the premise could be true..
A.A. Berezin of the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia started by suggesting that ‘biological organisms like ourselves or rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators’ may have already destroyed every species in their way without even realising what they’ve done.
He has published an early version of a paper which describes the ‘first in, last out’ solution to the Fermi Paradox, which suggests that the first lifeform to manage to travel through the stars ‘necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion’.
This story has attracted worldwide attention because, above all else, it makes for some good clickbait on social network ghettos. But the theory could be as true as just about any other one, no?
‘I am not suggesting that a highly developed civilization would consciously wipe out other lifeforms,’ Berezin wrote. ‘Most likely, they simply won’t notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it. ‘This problem is similar to the infamous “Tragedy of the commons”. The incentive to grab all available resources is strong, and it only takes one bad actor to ruin the equilibrium, with no possibility to prevent them from appearing at interstellar scale. ‘One rogue AI can potentially populate the entire supercluster with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a supercomputer, and there is no use asking why it would do that. All that matters is that it can.’
All that matters is it can.
