The future of AI?

[IATIA]

The fact that we don't see this all around is evidence that technological civilizations don't survive long enough for it to happen.

Not necessarily. They may just have not found us yet (or decided we were not worth investigating or worse yet, dangerous), after all, just our galaxy alone is really huge and then the number of galaxies in our cosmos makes our milky way tiny by comparison.

[Alex K]

The fact that we don't see this all around is evidence that technological civilizations don't survive long enough for it to happen.

Not necessarily. They may just have not found us yet (or decided we were not worth investigating or worse yet, dangerous), after all, just our galaxy alone is really huge and then the number of galaxies in our cosmos makes our milky way tiny by comparison.

Yeah... we haven't started broadcasting radio before 80 years ago. Even if there are millions of high level civilizations in the milkyway, I don't see how they would find us.

[JuliaL]

Not necessarily.  They may just have not found us yet (or decided we were not worth investigating or worse yet, dangerous), after all, just our galaxy alone is really huge and then the number of galaxies in our cosmos makes our milky way tiny by comparison.

Yeah... we haven't started broadcasting radio before 80 years ago. Even if there are millions of high level civilizations in the milkyway, I don't see how they would find us.

I think this was me parroting some vaguely remembered singularity based arguments I'd read on the internet.
But after a bit more investigation, whether this actually represents where my mind was while posting or not, my speculation parallels one of those used to explain the Fermi paradox. 
Fermi came up with this during the early UFO craze of the late 1940s.

Herbert York recalls that Fermi followed up on his comment with a series of calculations on the probability of Earth-like planets, the probability of life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, etc., and concluded that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over.

I think there was some mixing also of the view that we're all in the matrix because it's computationally more economical than having access to a ground level reality. (I don't happen to buy this argument, but then I wouldn't if the simulation was good enough, would I?)

The proposed reasons in the Wikipedia entry that we don't see advanced civilizations everywhere include:

1. Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent
   
2. No other intelligent species have arisen
   
3. Intelligent alien species lack advanced technology
   
4. It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
   
5. It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others
   
6. Periodic extinction by natural events
   
7. Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument
   
8. Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time
   
9. It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy
   
10. Human beings have not existed long enough
    
11. Humans are not listening properly
    
12. Civilizations broadcast detectable radio signals only for a brief period of time
    
13. They tend to isolate themselves
    
14. They are too alien
    
15. Everyone is listening, no one is transmitting
    
16. Earth is deliberately not contacted
    
17. Earth is purposely isolated (planetarium hypothesis)
    
18. It is dangerous to communicate
    
19. They are here undetected
    
20. They are here unacknowledged
    

Sheesh, that's a bunch of things I didn't think of.
I believe I homed in on 4. because I tend to focus on our current existential problems (which I don't see being solved and on which I believe we should concentrate because we have a chance to effect change.)  IATIA & Alex K looked to maybe be in 8., 10.,12., others. for reasons known to themselves.  Perhaps they're just more optimistic than me.

As always, the internet (even just Wikipedia) knows more than I do.

[Mister Agenda]

My own take is that although life may be relatively common, technological civilizations are vanishingly rare. Evolution is without any goals, so evolution leading to tech capable intelligence may be entirely coincidental. It only happened on earth once and only after over 4.5 billion years of evolution. And Earth has a number of 'evolution accelerators' that may be rarer than life itself. I'm thinking of our huge moon, periodic asteroid impacts and gas giant. One less or one more large asteroid impact and we wouldn't be here.

It would not surprise me if we are the only technological civilization in our galaxy.

[IATIA]

My own take is that although life may be relatively common, technological civilizations are vanishingly rare.

If it were not for the "comet" or whatever 65mya, there might still be dinosaurs here and no human life.

As to Fermi's paradox,  There are a lot of stars and the closest one with life could be 100 light years or more away and traveling that distance is tough.  We cannot travel to the stars with any technology we might have now or in the foreseeable future.  Finding technological life via radio waves is tough.  There is a lot of strong static and the weak radio waves that might be around are probably undetectable.  (think inverse square law).  Now if one were to beam a signal to us, that might very well work if we were looking for it and they knew we were here to point at us.

I am going to let you use my 'magical quantum computer laser'.  Point this at any technological life in the universe and it will get there at the speed of light and translate our language to theirs and vice versa.  No problem ... ?

1) The nearest one could be 1000 or more light years away.  That would be two millennia for a response.

2) So, where are you going to point it? Here is a map for you.

[dyresand]

My own take is that although life may be relatively common, technological civilizations are vanishingly rare.

If it were not for the "comet" or whatever 65mya, there might still be dinosaurs here and no human life.

As to Fermi's paradox,  There are a lot of stars and the closest one with life could be 100 light years or more away and traveling that distance is tough.  We cannot travel to the stars with any technology we might have now or in the foreseeable future.  Finding technological life via radio waves is tough.  There is a lot of strong static and the weak radio waves that might be around are probably undetectable.  (think inverse square law).  Now if one were to beam a signal to us, that might very well work if we were looking for it and they knew we were here to point at us.

I am going to let you use my 'magical quantum computer laser'.  Point this at any technological life in the universe and it will get there at the speed of light and translate our language to theirs and vice versa.  No problem ... ?

1) The nearest one could be 1000 or more light years away.  That would be two millennia for a response.

2) So, where are you going to point it?  Here is a map for you.

If i had to put my chips down we could be the more advance species out there which would be interesting if we are the first ones for interstellar travel.
But then again i could be wrong and there is another species out there that is more advanced.