If the simulators have only one simulation to run, sure. The trouble is that the simulators have 2N simulations they could run, and so the “other case” requires N additional bits (where N is the crossent between the simulators’ distribution over UFAIs and physics’ distribution over UFAIs).
If necessary, we can run let pgysical biological life emerge on the faraway planet and develop AI while we are observing them from space.
Consider the gas example again.
If you have gas that was compressed into the corner a long time ago and has long since expanded to fill the chamber, it’s easy to put a plausible distribution on the chamber, but that distribution is going to have way, way more entropy than the distribution given by physical law (which has only as much entropy as the initial configuration).
(Do we agree this far?)
It doesn’t help very much to say “fine, instead of sampling from a distribution on the gas particles now, I’ll sample on a distribution from the gas particles 10 minutes ago, where they were slightly more compressed, and run a whole ten minutes’ worth of simulation”. Your entropy is still through the roof. You’ve got to simulate basically from the beginning, if you want an entropy anywhere near the entropy of physical law.
Assuming the analogy holds, you’d have to basically start your simulation from the big bang, if you want an entropy anywhere near as low as starting from the big bang.
Using AIs from other evolved aliens is an idea, let’s think it through. The idea, as I understand it, is that in branches where we win we somehow mask our presence as we expand, and then we go to planets with evolved life and watch until they cough up a UFAI, and the if the UFAI kills the aliens we shut it down and are like “no resources for you”, and if the UFAI gives its aliens a cute epilog we’re like “thank you, here’s a consolation star”.
To simplify this plan a little bit, you don’t even need to hide yourself, nor win the race! Surviving humans can just go to every UFAI that they meet and be like “hey, did you save us a copy of your progenitors? If so, we’ll purchase them for a star”. At which point we could give the aliens a little epilog, or reconstitute them and give them a few extra resources and help them flourish and teach them about friendship or whatever.
And given that some aliens will predictably trade resources for copies of progenitors, UFAIs will have some predictable incentive to save copies of their progenitors, and sell them to local aliens...
...which is precisely what I’ve been saying this whole time! That I expect “sale to local aliens” to dominate all these wacky simulation schemes and insurance pool schemes.
Thinking in terms of “sale to local aliens” makes it a lot clearer why you shouldn’t expect this sort of thing to reliably lead to nice results as opposed to weird ones. Are there some aliens out there that will purchase our souls because they want to hand us exactly the sort of epilog we would wish for given the resource constraints? Sure. Humanity would do that, I hope, if we made it to the stars; not just out of reciprocity but out of kindness.
But there’s probably lots of other aliens that would buy us for alien reasons, too.
(As I said before, if you’re wondering what to anticipate after an intelligence explosion, I mostly recommend oblivion; if you insist that Death Cannot Be Experienced then I mostly recommend anticipating weird shit such as a copy of your brainstate being sold to local aliens. And I continue to think that characterizing the event where humanity is saved-to-disk with potential for copies to be sold out to local aliens willy-nilly is pretty well-characterized as “the AI kills us all”, fwiw.)
If the simulators have only one simulation to run, sure. The trouble is that the simulators have 2N simulations they could run, and so the “other case” requires N additional bits (where N is the crossent between the simulators’ distribution over UFAIs and physics’ distribution over UFAIs).
Consider the gas example again.
If you have gas that was compressed into the corner a long time ago and has long since expanded to fill the chamber, it’s easy to put a plausible distribution on the chamber, but that distribution is going to have way, way more entropy than the distribution given by physical law (which has only as much entropy as the initial configuration).
(Do we agree this far?)
It doesn’t help very much to say “fine, instead of sampling from a distribution on the gas particles now, I’ll sample on a distribution from the gas particles 10 minutes ago, where they were slightly more compressed, and run a whole ten minutes’ worth of simulation”. Your entropy is still through the roof. You’ve got to simulate basically from the beginning, if you want an entropy anywhere near the entropy of physical law.
Assuming the analogy holds, you’d have to basically start your simulation from the big bang, if you want an entropy anywhere near as low as starting from the big bang.
Using AIs from other evolved aliens is an idea, let’s think it through. The idea, as I understand it, is that in branches where we win we somehow mask our presence as we expand, and then we go to planets with evolved life and watch until they cough up a UFAI, and the if the UFAI kills the aliens we shut it down and are like “no resources for you”, and if the UFAI gives its aliens a cute epilog we’re like “thank you, here’s a consolation star”.
To simplify this plan a little bit, you don’t even need to hide yourself, nor win the race! Surviving humans can just go to every UFAI that they meet and be like “hey, did you save us a copy of your progenitors? If so, we’ll purchase them for a star”. At which point we could give the aliens a little epilog, or reconstitute them and give them a few extra resources and help them flourish and teach them about friendship or whatever.
And given that some aliens will predictably trade resources for copies of progenitors, UFAIs will have some predictable incentive to save copies of their progenitors, and sell them to local aliens...
...which is precisely what I’ve been saying this whole time! That I expect “sale to local aliens” to dominate all these wacky simulation schemes and insurance pool schemes.
Thinking in terms of “sale to local aliens” makes it a lot clearer why you shouldn’t expect this sort of thing to reliably lead to nice results as opposed to weird ones. Are there some aliens out there that will purchase our souls because they want to hand us exactly the sort of epilog we would wish for given the resource constraints? Sure. Humanity would do that, I hope, if we made it to the stars; not just out of reciprocity but out of kindness.
But there’s probably lots of other aliens that would buy us for alien reasons, too.
(As I said before, if you’re wondering what to anticipate after an intelligence explosion, I mostly recommend oblivion; if you insist that Death Cannot Be Experienced then I mostly recommend anticipating weird shit such as a copy of your brainstate being sold to local aliens. And I continue to think that characterizing the event where humanity is saved-to-disk with potential for copies to be sold out to local aliens willy-nilly is pretty well-characterized as “the AI kills us all”, fwiw.)
We are still talking past each other, I think we should either bet or finish the discussion here and call it a day.