The main world design challenge is not that of preventing our agents from waking up, neo-style, and hacking their way out of the simbox. That’s just bad sci-fi.
If we are in a simulation it seems to be very secure. People are always trying to hack it. Physicists go to the very bottom and try every weird trick. People discovered fire and gunpowder by digging deep into tiny inconsistencies. You play a game and there’s a glitch if you hold a box against the wall, you see how far that goes. People discovered buffer overflows in Super Mario World and any curious capable agent eventually will too.
For early simboxes we’ll want to stick to low-tech fantasy/historical worlds, and we won’t run them for many generations, no scientific revolution, etc.
Our world (sim) does seem very secure, but this could just be a clever illusion. The advanced sims will not be hand written code like current games are, they will be powerful neural networks, trained on vast real world data. They could also auto-detect and correct for (retrain) around anomalies, and in the worst case even unwind time.
Humans notice (or claim to notice) anomalies all the time, and we simply can’t distinguish anomalies in our brain’s neural nets from anomalies in a future simulation’s neural nets.
Just watch for anomalies and deal with them however you want. Makes perfect sense. That sounds like a relatively low effort way to make the simulation dramatically more secure.
Does seem to me like an old-fashioned physics/game engine might be easier to make, run faster, and be more self-consistent. It would probably lack superresolution and divine intervention would have to be done manually.
I’m curious what you see as the major benefits of neural-driven sim.
I just see neural-driven sims as the future largely because they can greatly reduce costs. Look at the art industry transformation enabled by the latest diffusion image generators and project that forward to film and then games. Eventually we will have fully automated pipelines that will take in prompts and then generate game designs, backstories, world histories, concept art, and then entire worlds. These pipelines will help us rapidly explore the space of environments that have the desired properties.
Astounding.
One thought:
If we are in a simulation it seems to be very secure. People are always trying to hack it. Physicists go to the very bottom and try every weird trick. People discovered fire and gunpowder by digging deep into tiny inconsistencies. You play a game and there’s a glitch if you hold a box against the wall, you see how far that goes. People discovered buffer overflows in Super Mario World and any curious capable agent eventually will too.
So the sim has to be like, very secure.
For early simboxes we’ll want to stick to low-tech fantasy/historical worlds, and we won’t run them for many generations, no scientific revolution, etc.
Our world (sim) does seem very secure, but this could just be a clever illusion. The advanced sims will not be hand written code like current games are, they will be powerful neural networks, trained on vast real world data. They could also auto-detect and correct for (retrain) around anomalies, and in the worst case even unwind time.
Humans notice (or claim to notice) anomalies all the time, and we simply can’t distinguish anomalies in our brain’s neural nets from anomalies in a future simulation’s neural nets.
Just watch for anomalies and deal with them however you want. Makes perfect sense. That sounds like a relatively low effort way to make the simulation dramatically more secure.
Does seem to me like an old-fashioned physics/game engine might be easier to make, run faster, and be more self-consistent. It would probably lack superresolution and divine intervention would have to be done manually.
I’m curious what you see as the major benefits of neural-driven sim.
I just see neural-driven sims as the future largely because they can greatly reduce costs. Look at the art industry transformation enabled by the latest diffusion image generators and project that forward to film and then games. Eventually we will have fully automated pipelines that will take in prompts and then generate game designs, backstories, world histories, concept art, and then entire worlds. These pipelines will help us rapidly explore the space of environments that have the desired properties.