This co-opts Bostrom’s Simulation argument, but a possible solution to the fermi paradox is that we are all AI’s in the box, and the simulators have produced billions of humans in order to find the most friendly human to release from the box. Moral of the story, be good and become a god
Assuming the simulators are good, that would imply that people who experience lives not worth living are not actually people (since otherwise it would be evil to simulate them) but instead shallow ‘AIs’. Paradoxically, if that argument is true, there is nothing good about being good.
Hmm I still think that there is incentive to behave good. Good, cooperative behavior is always more useful than being untrustworthy and cruel to other entities. There might be some exceptions, thought (simulators want conflict situation for entertainment purposes or some other reasons).
Well, yeah, you should still be good to your friends and other presumably real people. However, there would be no point in, say, trying to save people from the holocaust, since the simulators wouldn’t let actual people get tortured and burnt.
The simulators may justify in their minds actual people getting tortured and burnt by suggesting that most of the people will not experience too much suffering, that the simulations would not otherwise have lived (although this fails to distinguish between lives and lives worth living), and that they can end the simulation if our suffering becomes too great. That the hypothetical simulators did not step in during the many genocides in our kind’s history may suggest that they either do not exist, or that creating an FAI is more important to them than preventing human suffering.
It is possible that in that only few people are actually ‘players’ (have consciousness) and others are NPC-like p-zombies. In that case, I can say I’m one of the players, as I’m sure that I have consciousness, but there is no way I can prove it to anyone else ;-) .
One of the positive aspects of this kind of thought experiments is that usually gives people additional reasons for good behavior because in most cases it is highly likely that simulators are conscious creatures who will probably reward those who behave ethically.
This co-opts Bostrom’s Simulation argument, but a possible solution to the fermi paradox is that we are all AI’s in the box, and the simulators have produced billions of humans in order to find the most friendly human to release from the box. Moral of the story, be good and become a god
Assuming the simulators are good, that would imply that people who experience lives not worth living are not actually people (since otherwise it would be evil to simulate them) but instead shallow ‘AIs’. Paradoxically, if that argument is true, there is nothing good about being good.
Or something along those lines.
Hmm I still think that there is incentive to behave good. Good, cooperative behavior is always more useful than being untrustworthy and cruel to other entities. There might be some exceptions, thought (simulators want conflict situation for entertainment purposes or some other reasons).
Well, yeah, you should still be good to your friends and other presumably real people. However, there would be no point in, say, trying to save people from the holocaust, since the simulators wouldn’t let actual people get tortured and burnt.
The simulators may justify in their minds actual people getting tortured and burnt by suggesting that most of the people will not experience too much suffering, that the simulations would not otherwise have lived (although this fails to distinguish between lives and lives worth living), and that they can end the simulation if our suffering becomes too great. That the hypothetical simulators did not step in during the many genocides in our kind’s history may suggest that they either do not exist, or that creating an FAI is more important to them than preventing human suffering.
I had exactly the same idea!
It is possible that in that only few people are actually ‘players’ (have consciousness) and others are NPC-like p-zombies. In that case, I can say I’m one of the players, as I’m sure that I have consciousness, but there is no way I can prove it to anyone else ;-) .
One of the positive aspects of this kind of thought experiments is that usually gives people additional reasons for good behavior because in most cases it is highly likely that simulators are conscious creatures who will probably reward those who behave ethically.
I admit that it serves my ego suitably to imagine that I am the only conscious human, and a world full of shallow-AI’s was created just for me ;-)