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I feel wholly unconvinced that future civilizations will definitely build ancestor simulations. I feel like a lot of these arguments do a bad job of explaining

I feel wholly unconvinced that future civilizations will definitely build ancestor simulations. I feel like a lot of these arguments do a bad job of explaining what utility these ancestor simulations would be to the future civilizations, and basically say something like “it will be so easy to create such a simulation, members of the future society will just create them on a whim for amusement.” But given that Moore’s law has run out and there are no pathways we can see to faster computation (we’re even starting to hit the bedrock of physics in our search) such a simulation would probably require considerable resources. We’re talking like, mining asteroids for silicon and indium and using immense solar panels for energy. Which gets me to the point that I think strikes at the heart of the argument and kills it: A society capable of ancestor simulations would have to be extremely highly ordered. The universe abhors order and is constantly regressing to higher entropy states. So while the existence of such a society may not be impossible, it would seem to be very very unlikely (and perhaps even short-lived if it did happen), thus meaning there probably aren’t many long-lived high-quality ancestor simulations, and thus we probably aren’t living in one.

naasking 7y ago
> I feel like a lot of these arguments do a bad job of explaining what utility these ancestor simulations would be to the future civilizations, and basically say something like “it will be so easy to create such a simulation, members of the future society will just create them on a whim for amusement.” Why do people run the sims game today? Isn't that a waste of time even by modern standards? Would future humans not waste time with entertainment? Look at how much time people spend on analyzing Conway's Game of Life to find new constructions. Isn't it plausible that future humans might play with what parameters would have had Trump lose in 2016? Which leads to: ancestor simulations would have significant historical importance. How many historians today would love to simulate what would have happened had Hitler won? Or what would have happened had one of the plots against Alexander the Great succeeded? Ancestor simulations would also have economic importance. We already simulate toy economic models. However, we also know that humans aren't prefectly rational. If one day we understand the algorithms driving human brains, why wouldn't you run your economic simulations with real human minds for more precision? I could go on, but I think the point is clear. We have no reason to suppose any of these values would change in "post-humans". They would still have incomplete information about the world, but they would be able to handle substantially more complexity, at the very least because of the simulations they have available to them. > But given that Moore’s law has run out and there are no pathways we can see to faster computation There are many, many pathways forwards that are being explored (optical computing, amorphous computing, reversible computing, etc.). Our current architectures are in fact quite inefficient. We could be making much more use of parallelism, for instance.

naasking 7y ago

> I feel like a lot of these arguments do a bad job of explaining what utility these ancestor simulations would be to the future civilizations, and basically say something like “it will be so easy to create such a simulation, members of the future society will just create them on a whim for amusement.” Why do people run the sims game today? Isn't that a waste of time even by modern standards? Would future humans not waste time with entertainment? Look at how much time people spend on analyzing Conway's Game of Life to find new constructions. Isn't it plausible that future humans might play with what parameters would have had Trump lose in 2016? Which leads to: ancestor simulations would have significant historical importance. How many historians today would love to simulate what would have happened had Hitler won? Or what would have happened had one of the plots against Alexander the Great succeeded? Ancestor simulations would also have economic importance. We already simulate toy economic models. However, we also know that humans aren't prefectly rational. If one day we understand the algorithms driving human brains, why wouldn't you run your economic simulations with real human minds for more precision? I could go on, but I think the point is clear. We have no reason to suppose any of these values would change in "post-humans". They would still have incomplete information about the world, but they would be able to handle substantially more complexity, at the very least because of the simulations they have available to them. > But given that Moore’s law has run out and there are no pathways we can see to faster computation There are many, many pathways forwards that are being explored (optical computing, amorphous computing, reversible computing, etc.). Our current architectures are in fact quite inefficient. We could be making much more use of parallelism, for instance.