I like this text but I find your take on Fermi paradox wholly unrealistic.
Let’s even assume, for the sake of the argument, that both P(life) and P(sapience|life) are bigger than 1/googol (though why?) so your hunch on how many planets originally evolve sapient aliens is broadly correct. A very substantial part of alternative histories of the last century (I wanted to say “most” but most, of course, is uninteresting differences such as whether a random human puts a right shoe or a left shoe on first) result in humanity dead or thrown into possibly-irrecoverable barbarism. The default take for aliens that have evolved is to fail their version of Berlin crisis, or Caribbean crisis, or whatever other near-total-destruction situation we’ve had even without AI (not necessarily with nuclear weapons, mind you—say, what if instead of pretty-harmless-in-comparison COVID we got a sterilizing virus on the loose that kills genitalia instead of osmotic nerves? Since its method of proliferation does not depend on the host’s ability to procreate, you could imagine sterilized population of the planet). And then you tack on the fact that you also predict very high chance of AGI ruin; so most of the hypothetical aliens that survived the kind of hurdles humanity somehow survived (again, with possibly totally different specifics) are replaced by misaligned AGI, throwing a huge hurdle into the cosmopolitan result you predict—meeting paperclip-maximiser built by ant-people is more likely than meeting ant-people themselves, given your background beliefs.
I like this text but I find your take on Fermi paradox wholly unrealistic.
Let’s even assume, for the sake of the argument, that both P(life) and P(sapience|life) are bigger than 1/googol (though why?) so your hunch on how many planets originally evolve sapient aliens is broadly correct. A very substantial part of alternative histories of the last century (I wanted to say “most” but most, of course, is uninteresting differences such as whether a random human puts a right shoe or a left shoe on first) result in humanity dead or thrown into possibly-irrecoverable barbarism. The default take for aliens that have evolved is to fail their version of Berlin crisis, or Caribbean crisis, or whatever other near-total-destruction situation we’ve had even without AI (not necessarily with nuclear weapons, mind you—say, what if instead of pretty-harmless-in-comparison COVID we got a sterilizing virus on the loose that kills genitalia instead of osmotic nerves? Since its method of proliferation does not depend on the host’s ability to procreate, you could imagine sterilized population of the planet). And then you tack on the fact that you also predict very high chance of AGI ruin; so most of the hypothetical aliens that survived the kind of hurdles humanity somehow survived (again, with possibly totally different specifics) are replaced by misaligned AGI, throwing a huge hurdle into the cosmopolitan result you predict—meeting paperclip-maximiser built by ant-people is more likely than meeting ant-people themselves, given your background beliefs.