This series of posts, written by Will Petillo, is a summary of Forrest Landry's Substrate Needs Convergence (SNC) argument, as well as additional material from Anders Sandberg and Remmelt Ellen. The central thesis is that any attempt to implement or use AGI will eventually result in the total termination of all carbon-based life on Earth. The argument proceeds from the premise that AGI will necessarily be implemented on a silica-based substrate, which operates at fundamentally different energy, temperature, and pressure ranges than carbon-based life. Because silica-based systems have no natural competitors in the carbon ecosystem and require conditions inhospitable to biological life, the two substrates cannot coexist without a perfectly maintained barrier. However, AGI undergoes evolutionary pressures to expand its material base, which converges over the long term on making the Earth uninhabitable for biological life. It is impossible in principle to build AGI such that it is compatible with biological life.
Consider not only what AI systems do directly, but also the second order effects of the system's interactions with the environment, including all sources of variation-producing uncertainty, up to and including the resulting global equilibrium.