For Bostrom’s simulation argument to conclude the disjunction of the two interesting propositions (our doom, or we’re sims), you need to assume there are simulation runners who are motivated to do very large numbers of ancestor simulations. The simulation runners would be ultrapowerful, probably rich, amoral history/anthropology nerds, because all the other ultrapowerful amoral beings have more interesting things to occupy themselves with. If it’s a set-it-and-forget-it simulation, that might be plausible. If the simulation requires monitoring and manual intervention, I think it’s very implausible.
For Bostrom’s simulation argument to conclude the disjunction of the two interesting propositions (our doom, or we’re sims), you need to assume there are simulation runners who are motivated to do very large numbers of ancestor simulations. The simulation runners would be ultrapowerful, probably rich, amoral history/anthropology nerds, because all the other ultrapowerful amoral beings have more interesting things to occupy themselves with.
While Bostrom’s argument as originally stated does reference specifically ancestor studies, here Bostrom says:
More generally, simulators might create many simulated people who are very different from their own ancestors, or who live in worlds that are very different from the one that the simulators live in. It is possible that we are living in such a simulation. I don’t know of any way of estimating the probability that our hypothetical simulators (or their ancestors) are similar to us, or that their world is similar to the world we experience. (The original paper focuses on ancestor-simulations because the methodology is more solid for that case. It is less clear whether some kind of principle of indifference could also be applied to a reference class of “observer-moments” that are very different from one another...).
So, I think that the simulation argument could be generalized to refer to “civilization simulations” in lieu of “ancestor simulations”. If so, there is no reason to assume that the simulation runners would necessarily be history/anthropology nerds. In fact, there could be any number of reasons why running a civilization simulation could be useful or interesting.
For Bostrom’s simulation argument to conclude the disjunction of the two interesting propositions (our doom, or we’re sims), you need to assume there are simulation runners who are motivated to do very large numbers of ancestor simulations. The simulation runners would be ultrapowerful, probably rich, amoral history/anthropology nerds, because all the other ultrapowerful amoral beings have more interesting things to occupy themselves with. If it’s a set-it-and-forget-it simulation, that might be plausible. If the simulation requires monitoring and manual intervention, I think it’s very implausible.
While Bostrom’s argument as originally stated does reference specifically ancestor studies, here Bostrom says:
So, I think that the simulation argument could be generalized to refer to “civilization simulations” in lieu of “ancestor simulations”. If so, there is no reason to assume that the simulation runners would necessarily be history/anthropology nerds. In fact, there could be any number of reasons why running a civilization simulation could be useful or interesting.