A field guide to civilisational risk

The Great Silence

Six frames for thinking about artificial intelligence at civilisational scale, borrowed from the search for aliens.

For sixty years, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has asked one question: why is the universe silent? Every answer proposed (the Dark Forest, the Zoo, the Great Filter) is a hypothesis about what happens to a civilisation that becomes technologically capable.

That is now the most useful literature we have for thinking about AI. The industry building it has mostly not read it.

Start reading The six frames

The six frames

Read the introduction, then take the frames in any order. Each essay stands alone.

01 The silence that isn't Absence is data. 02 The Dark Forest What you leak, and who is listening. 03 The Aestivation Hypothesis Heat is waste, and waste is a decision. 04 The Zoo Hypothesis When observing becomes controlling. 05 The Byzantine Generals Agreement without a trusted authority. 06 The Great Filter Who can turn it off.

What you do with it

Each essay ends with one exercise and one real case. The exercises are small and concrete: audit what you leak, measure what a script costs, write a kill switch policy for a tool you actually use.

Reading without doing is entertainment. The exercises are where the thinking happens.

Also here

The Silent Server: a hands-on lab. Harden a Linux server until a scanner finds nothing.
Sessions: a four-session live edition, run occasionally.
Toy: a small browser game about broadcasting.

Who this is for

People who work with technology and want to reason about it: engineers, product people, security folk, policy people, managers. No maths or code is required except where an exercise asks for it.

Licence

Prose is CC BY-SA 4.0. Code is MIT. Read it, reuse it, teach it, with attribution.