Showing posts with label nick bostrom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nick bostrom. Show all posts

Sunday, April 06, 2008

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.