David Kipping

And you see that our society is undergoing a change that seems significant in terms of the development of artificial intelligence.

We've been promised this

revolution to Singularity for a long time, but it really seems to be stepping up its pace of development at this point.

That's interesting because as someone who looks for alien life out there in the universe, it sort of implies that our current stage of development is highly transitional and that

You go back for the last 4.5 billion years, the planet was dumb, essentially.

If you go back the last few thousand years, there was a civilization, but it wasn't really producing any technosignatures.

And then over the last maybe 100 years, there's been something that might be detectable from afar.

But we're approaching this cusp where we might imagine it.

I mean, we're thinking of maybe years and decades with AI development, typically when we talk about this.

But as an astronomer, I have to think about much longer timescales of centuries, millennia, millions of years.

And so if this wave continues over that timescale, which is still the blink of an eye on a cosmic timescale, that implies that

Everything will be AI essentially out there if this is a common behavior.

And so that's intriguing because it sort of implies that we are special in terms of our moment in time as a civilization, which it normally is...

something we're averse to as astronomers.

We normally like this mediocrity principle.

We're not special.

We're a typical part of the universe.

It's not the cosmological principle, but in a temporal sense, we may be in a unique location.

And perhaps that is part of the solution to the Fermi paradox, in fact, that if it is true that

Planets tend to go through basically three phases.