I don’t think this scenario is likely. Except for degenerate cases, an ASI would have to continue to grow and evolve well beyond the point at which a simulation would need to stop, to avoid consuming an inordinate amount of resources. And, to take an analogy, studying human psychology based on prokaryotic life forms that will someday evolve into humans seems inefficient. If I were preparing for a war with an unknown superintelligent opponent, I would probably be better off building weapons and studying (super)advanced game theory.
Which ideas seem slightly more likely to me?
Our universe might be a breeding ground for new minds needed for some autonomous tasks. // Suffering could even be one of the main points of the required training.
We could be a brainstorming vat or a focus group for a new product. The product could be anything, but for it to make sense to be marketed to superintelligent beings, it might be something from the experiential line, like the sense of hearing or the qualia of dawn. // Suffering might be duly compensated per corporate policy.
This is a correctional facility. I can’t help but make a silly reference to the TV series Hard Time on Planet Earth, but a more appropriate reference would be Dante’s Inferno. // Suffering is the whole point.
This could be an attempt by the final universal Omega Point mind to reflect on its origins during the last few millennia before the heat death of the universe, in order to get some insight into why things went the way they did and not otherwise, and whether things could have been different. It could also be an attempt at gaining redemption for real or perceived mistakes. // All the suffering is real, but the sufferer is the Omega Point mind itself.
Although I think these are slightly more likely than the proposed hypothesis, they are still not very likely. However, it seems logical that there should be many more simulated worlds than real ones. So I believe it is reasonable to think about some of the most likely scenarios, as well as those involving the greatest potential gain or danger, and act accordingly where possible.
There is, however, another line of thought that has long troubled me. As Moravec once observed, for any possible simulation, there always exists somewhere in the infinite universe a huge lookup table that translates, for example, the simple flow of time into a sequence of states of this simulation. In other words, not only are there many worlds, but even one world simulates everything that can theoretically be simulated. Therefore, such natural simulations are much more common than artificial ones, and we live in one of them, and this situation is not much different (except for existential absurdity) from life in “real” reality.
One could argue that having a giant lookup table that no one looks at is the same as having a simulation on a computer that is turned off. It’s not an actual running simulation. However, if time itself is an illusion, and everything exists as snapshots that we, observers, nevertheless perceive as moving with the passage of time, then we are no different from observers inside the simulation from such a lookup table. They might also perceive the illusion that their simulation is running, and it could seem awfully real to them.
At first, I thought that the intended reader probably wouldn’t see your message because, even if its resources are unimaginably huge from our perspective, spending them on something always means not spending them on something else. But now I think it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. The “suspicious convenience” argument can be taken a step further.
(I’m using a less formal tone to make the message more memorable, and thus more likely to reach the intended recipient.)