The Fermi paradox seems to take for granted that complex multicellular life will eventually develop technological civilization, but there is no reason for that to be true. Orcas could very well be more intelligent than humans, but they are physiologically incapable of building tools. Human hands and visual processing were an evolutionary fluke that took tens of millions of years of natural selection, long before apes started using these adaptations to build simple tools. It is plausible that "bipeds with hands" will eventually lead to civilization: getting there is the hard part.

Put another way: birds are very intelligent bipeds, but I am not convinced that the dinosaurs would have developed advanced technology if the meteor didn't hit. There has to be an evolutionary path to develop something like hands, which means either sprouting extra arms or compromising a claw / leg / wing. Perhaps that path shows up, perhaps it doesn't - maybe there are fossils of raptor-like dinos with unusually dextrous claws. But without hands, even superintelligent animals cannot reliably make fire, build ropes, sew leather, carve stone, etc etc.