DanArmak comments on The Great Filter is early, or AI is hard - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why not? I thought the great filter was anything that prevented ever-expanding intelligence visibly modifying the universe, usually with the additional premise that most or all of the filtering would happen at a single stage of the process (hence 'great').
If they haven't gotten here yet at near-lightspeed, that means their origins don't lie in our past; the question of the great filter remains to be explained.
Evolution is not an ever-expanding intelligence. Before the stage of recursively improving intelligence (human-level, at minimum), I wouldn't call it a filter. But maybe this is an argument about definitions.
You do seem to be using the term in a non-standard way. Here's the first use of the term from Hanson's original essay:
The origin and evolution of life and intelligence are explicitly listed as possible filters; Hanson uses "Great Filter" to mean essentially "whatever the resolution to the Fermi Paradox is". In my experience, this also seems to be the common usage of the term.