AI: the Ziggy Stardust Syndrome

“Ziggy sucked up into his mind.” –David Bowie

In his Wall Street Journal column this weekend, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers a fascinating theory as to why we haven’t been able to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Maybe, he suggests, intelligent beings are fated to shrink as their intelligence expands. Once the singularity happens, AI implodes into invisibility.

It’s entirely logical. Wilczek notes that “effective computation must involve interactions and that th...