Advanced civilizations forgo simulation?

Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument articulates three future possibilities: “either almost every civilization like ours goes extinct before reaching technological maturity; or almost every mature civilization lacks any interest in building Matrices; or almost all people with our kind of experiences live in Matrices. He suggests that there is a 20% chance based on what we know now that we are living in a matrix.

Considering these three possibilities, the second case looks most probable, that technologically-mature civilizations are not interested in running simulations. It could be quite possible both because of its own likelihood and the likelihood of there being little value to simulations with more primitive self-aware participants (ourselves).

Future irrelevance of simulations with self-aware participants
It is quite possible that technologically-advanced societies may be able to achieve their objectives more effectively by other means rather than by running simulations. These more efficient means could be pure math, higher levels of abstraction, greater intelligence and better tools.

The main reasons that a non-technologically advanced society like ours thinks running simulations would be useful are to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our behaviors, to explore alternative histories and for leisure and entertainment either as observers or participants.

It is quite possible in the future that societies and entities will understand themselves so well that simulation will not be necessary. For example, augmented reality overlays could display or predict another party's utility function and provide a 3d data visualization of their likely future behaviors.

Alternative histories (e.g.; Napoleon not defeated at Waterloo, no Yucatan impact asteroid 65 million years ago, Greenland ice sheet not melting in the 2000s) would not need to be run, they would just be known or predictable. They would be obvious to a super-intelligence in the same way that I know my shoe will come untied if I pull on the lace, I do not need to actually try it. This may also be true for clinical trials and all areas of biology and most scientific experiments. Simulations with self-aware participants could be useful to a future society, but only in a forward-looking sense for more complex situations than can be handled by whatever the CurrentTech is, and the self-aware participants would be contemporary to that era not historical (us).

There are other situations where the objective is not obtaining information, the ever-burgeoning entertainment field for example. Entertainment simulations with self-aware participants would certainly be in demand. However, the primitive level of current humans would render us uninteresting in interactions with future society. For time tourism back in history, again, there is no reason to have primitive self-aware agents such as ourselves, artificial intelligences or non-sentient simulations could more adequately realize the experience.

Finally, there is the possibility that new reasons for running simulations could emerge as society advances, and it would be for these as yet unknown reasons that a future society would run simulations, and yes, there is some non-zero possibility of this.

Conclusion
It could be quite likely that future society will have more advanced technology than simulation, and even in the cases when it is interesting for future society to run simulations with self-aware participants, these self-aware participants would likely be contemporary not primitive (us). There may be less than a 20% chance that we are living in a simulation.

Historical Simulation Ethical Issues

Historical Sims will be a tremendously useful tool but they are also rife with ethical issues, even without considering that ethics will also evolve morefold by the time historical sims are a norm.

Sim Influencing and Harvesting
To what degree (if any) will external influencing, probing, shifting, etc. be acceptable once the sim has begun? Outsiders do not bring medicine and electricity to tribes living on Earth, the general thought is not to interfere with less-technologically advanced cultures if they are found elsewhere in the world or the universe, but many might want future technology introduced from outside if it were possible. One of the great potential benefits of a sim would be to extract and deploy any developed technologies that do not exist; is this ethical? Both the technology extraction and the introduction would need to be considered, for example, should attribution and royalties accrue to the sim world?

Sim Participant Ethics
Perhaps the largest class of ethical issues relates to sim participants. Self-aware agents (either recruited or created) as sim participants will presumably be more effective than non self-aware agents. The sim participants will either know that they are in a sim and have accepted the historical terms (as in Charles Stross' Glasshouse), particularly the primitive pain and misery of historical harm and death (war, disease, etc.), or not know that they are in a sim, in which case perhaps some argument could be made that it is all right that they do not know since in fact we cannot prove that we are not in a sim ourselves.

Sim Mindfile Access and Participant Privacy
One benefit of sim space is that not just the event outcomes can be known but also much more about the views and experiences of all of the participants not just those who wrote about it or were written about and even before writing and records were preserved. Is it appropriate and ethical to "mindtap" without the sim participant's permission? If the participants know they are being mindtapped, will that heisenberg behavior? Although lifecasting is rapidly approaching normalcy in the current technophilic world, it would be culturally unacceptable in historical periods.

Sim Termination
The issues concerning the termination of sims are non-trivial. Given unlimited processing power, and as a test of existential risk, there is an argument to let all sims continue indefinitely. How is extinguishing a sim not the murder of the self-aware participants or will it be desirable and possible to offer mindfile backups to all participants? This can be tricky, should "death rights" be different for those dying naturally within the sim vs. those dying in an extinguishment of the sim? What are the best approaches if the sim culture does not yet have mindfile backup technology; introduce the idea to sim participants and let them choose, save everyone irrespectively (this could be the future law anyway) with or without their knowledge or allow extinguishment? What would the options be for a mindfile exiting a sim? A state-assigned runtime area and survival resources, and access to the dial-a-world console?

Sims Sponsor Technological Advancement

Running simulations of the past, present and future will be valuable tools in exploring, understanding and testing any and every situation.

What if Rome did not fall, what if Germany won WWII, what if humans were not corrupt, what if it were socially unacceptable for educated women not to work in the paid labor force, what if hormone management programs had become possible and de rigueur centuries ago, what if the Pangaea split had been different, what if the Chicxulub asteroid had not rendered the dinosaurs extinct, what if sustainable life had started earlier?

Technological Advancement
The most useful sims would be those either arising naturally or "managed" such that advancement optima were achieved and the sim world evolved at a faster rate than the world that initiated the sim (how many sims and iterations will that take?) Sims could be run at sped-up time to iterate and generate results more quickly. Ideas and technologies could then be harvested for use in the initiating world. (Would that be ethical? Would that be cheating?)

It might be easier and more desirable to join the sim world, at least with a self-copy rather than extract and apply the technology. Lequel est plus réelle? Some interesting questions could be studied regarding technology relevance in the absence of the ideology, politics, economics, culture [and world] of its founding.

The current human population is gated by physical-world resource constraints, sims could make it possible for billions, trillions, etc. of 'people,' self-aware autonomous intelligent agents, to exist. Would this be desirable? Would this extend human knowledge, productivity, creativity and happiness? What kind of restrictions, fears, threats and opportunities would this impose?