> By contraposition, if escape from the simulation is not possible, containment of AI should be. This is a flawed argument, though. If we live in a simulation,

> By contraposition, if escape from the simulation is not possible, containment of AI should be. This is a flawed argument, though. If we live in a simulation, our lived experiences suggest that there's no information coming into the simulation from the outside. AI, on the other hand, has a bidirectional interface: the whole point is that we communicate with it from the outside. If we created an AI that we listened to but never replied to—assuming the actions we took as a result of listening to the AI never provided it with feedback—it's as good as contained. We'd have to assume that not only is someone outside the simulation listening to us, but that they actually have a mechanism for replying. Information from inside the simulation escaping is sort of the whole point of a simulation (if you can't observe what you're simulating, why bother?). It's also silly to think that we could affect the "outside". The idea of AI escaping is premised on us developing something that convinces us to do what it wants. We're simulating just a mind. The simulation we're in—if we are in a simulation—simulates every quark in every particle in every atom in every molecule in every chunk of rock in every galaxy in the universe. We're talking about building AIs that could escape while just barely managing to overcome spooky CUDA errors, while our world is an emergent fleck of dust in a corner of their simulation. The point being: if they can simulate our entire universe, they can also simulate just a mind (in the same way that we are) that's literally infinitely more powerful (which is to say, backed by the computing resources that we consider to be "the infinite") which can out-think whatever we shout out of the simulation. Or inspect the state of the simulation and discover our true intentions. Or whatever. Said another way, we're afraid of super intelligent AI because it's running on theoretical compute that is as powerful as we can come up with. We (and our AIs) are compute running in a rounding error of a fraction of whatever their compute is. We could build Dyson spheres around every star in our galaxy to power a computer running an unfathomably super intelligent AI and it would still be quadrillions (more?) of orders of magnitude less powerful than the hardware simulating our universe. Therefore, the property that makes escape impossible for us isn't the interface, it's that we can't outsmart the entities outside. The playing field is different inside the simulation, because our AI is able to be smarter than us.