sveme parent
That's actually my favourite answer to the Fermi paradox: when AI and robot development becomes sufficiently advanced and concentrated in the hands of a few, then the economy will collapse completely as everyone will be out of jobs, leading ultimately to AIs and robots out of a job - they only matter if there are still people buying services from them.
People then return to sustenance farming, with a highly reduced population. There will be self-maintained robots doing irrelevant work, but people will go back to farming and a bit of trading.
Only if AI and robot ownership would be in the hands of the masses I'd expect a different long term outcome.
> my favourite answer to the Fermi paradox
So, to be clear, you are saying you imagine the odds of any kind of intelligent life escaping that, or getting into that situation and ever evolving in a way where it can reach space again, or just not being interested in robots, or being interested on doing space research despite the robots, or anything else that would make it not apply are lower than 0.000000000001%?
EDIT: There was one "0" too many
Might I have taken the potential for complete economic collapse because no one's got a paying job any more and billionaires are just sitting there, surrounded by their now useless robots, to the too extreme?
Unless you expect people to react really badly (a nuclear war isn't bad enough, from a large margin), then yes. And by "expect", I mean more certain than people get on physics.
The service economy will collapse, finance as a whole will collapse, but whoever controls the actual physical land and resources doesn't actually need any of that stuff and will thrive immensely. We would end up with either an oligarchy that controls land, resources and robots and molds the rest of humanity to their whim through a form of terror, or an independent economy of robots that outcompetes us for resources until we go extinct.