Attempt at the briefest content-full Less Wrong post:
Once AI is developed, it could "easily" colonise the universe. So the Great Filter (preventing the emergence of star-spanning civilizations) must strike before AI could be developed. If AI is easy, we could conceivably have built it already, or we could be on the cusp of building it. So the Great Filter must predate us, unless AI is hard.
Energy acquisition is a useful subgoal for nearly any final goal and has non-starsystem-local scope. This makes strong AIs which stay local implausible.
If the final goal is of local scope, energy acquisition from out-of-system seems to be mostly irrelevant, considering the delays of space travel and the fast time-scales a strong AI seems likely to operate at. (That is, assuming no FTL and the like.)
Do you have any plausible scenario in mind where an AI would be powerful enough to colonize the universe, but do it because it needs energy for doing something inside its system of origin?
I might see one perhaps extending to a few neighboring systems in a very dense cluster for some strange reason, but I can’t... (read more)