I tend to believe that molecular technology and AI are the great filter. Just picture the situation we find ourselves in: We are stuff made from the rules of th

I tend to believe that molecular technology and AI are the great filter. Just picture the situation we find ourselves in: We are stuff made from the rules of the pattern generating system that we call our universe. We are figuring out the rules and we are continuously improving our tools to manipulate stuff at an ever lower level. Once we can easily manipulate the building blocks our existence is based on, it opens the door to such a tremendously large number of ways how things can go wrong that the probability of self-destruction comes very close to 1. It would require an extremely high intelligence to deal with all these failure modes, something that an biochemistry-based evolutionary process is highly unlikely to bring forth. The problem is basically that figuring the rules out is much easier than using them safely. The invention of AI makes our tools to manipulate matter vastly more dangerous, for example, intelligent gray goo would be smart enough to not immediately eat away its basis for existence and to plan ahead instead of just executing a simple rule set.