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Kyre comments on The Great Filter is early, or AI is hard - Less Wrong
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I think it's quite unlikely, yes.
It seems like a natural class of explanations for the fermi paradox, one which I am always surprised never gets more people coming up with it. Most people pile into 'intelligent systems almost never appear' or 'intelligent systems have extremely short lifespans'. Why not 'intelligent systems find it vanishingly difficult to spread beyond small islands'? It seems more reasonable to me than either of the two previous ones, as it is something that we haven't seen intelligent systems do yet (we are an example of one both arising and sticking around for a long time).
If I must point out more justification than that, I would immediately go with:
1 - All but one of our ships BUILT for space travel that have gone on to escape velocity have failed after a few decades and less than 100 AUs. Space is a hard place to survive in.
2 - All self-replicating systems on earth live in a veritable bath of materials and energy they can draw on; a long-haul space ship has to either use literally astronomical energy at the source and destination to change velocity, or 'live' off only catabolizing itself in an incredibly hostile environment for millennia at least while containing everything it needs to set up self-replication in a completely alien environment.
Edit: a friend of mine has brought my attention to this paper:
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/percolation.htp
it proposes a percolation model of interstellar travel in which there is a maximum possible colonization distance and a probability of any successful colonization spawning colonizers themselves. It avoids all three above-posited explanations for the fermi paradox and instead proposes a model of expansion that does not lead to exponential consumption of everything.
Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, are currently 218 and 105 AU from the Sun, and are both are still communicating. They were designed to reach Jupiter and Saturn - Voyager 2 had mission extensions to Uranus and Neptune (interestingly, it was completely reprogrammed after the Saturn encounter, and now makes use of communication codes that hadn't been invented when it was launched).
Pioneers 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and 73 and remained in contact until 2003 and 1995 respectively, with their failure being due to insufficient power for communication coming from their radioisotope power sources. Pioneer 10 stayed in communication to 80 AU.
New Horizons was launched in 2006 and is still going (encounter with Pluto next year). So, 3 out of 5 probes designed to explore the outer solar system are still going, 2 with 1970s technology.
The voyagers are 128 and 104 AUs out upon me looking them up - looks like I missed Voyager 2 hitting the 100 AU mark about a year and a half ago.
Still get what you are saying. Still not convinced that all that much has been done in the realm of spacecraft reliability recently aside from avoiding moving parts and having lots of redundancy, they have major issues quite frequently. Additionally all outer solar system probes are essentially rapidly catabolizing plutonium pellets they bring along for the ride with effective lifetimes in decades before they are unable to power themselves and before their instruments degrade from lack of active heating and other management that keeps them functional.