If you assume sentience cut-off as a problem, it boils down to the Doomsday argument: why are we so early in the history of humanity? Maybe our civilization becomes non-sentient after the 21st century, either because of extinction or non-sentient AI takeover.
If we agree with the Doomsday argument here, we should agree that most AI-civilizations are non-sentient. And as most Grabby Aliens are AI-civilizations, they are non-sentient.
TLDR: If we apply anthropics to the location of sentience in time, we should assume that Grabby Aliens are non-sentient, and thus the Grabby Alien argument is not affected by the earliness of our sentience.
And given that the earliness of our sentience is the very thing the Grabby Aliens argument is supposed to explain, I think this non-dependence is damning for it.
If you assume sentience cut-off as a problem, it boils down to the Doomsday argument: why are we so early in the history of humanity? Maybe our civilization becomes non-sentient after the 21st century, either because of extinction or non-sentient AI takeover.
If we agree with the Doomsday argument here, we should agree that most AI-civilizations are non-sentient. And as most Grabby Aliens are AI-civilizations, they are non-sentient.
TLDR: If we apply anthropics to the location of sentience in time, we should assume that Grabby Aliens are non-sentient, and thus the Grabby Alien argument is not affected by the earliness of our sentience.
Agreed.
And given that the earliness of our sentience is the very thing the Grabby Aliens argument is supposed to explain, I think this non-dependence is damning for it.