This is really weird line of reasoning, because “multiversal trading” doesn’t mean “trading with entire multiverse”, it means “finding suitable trading partner in multiverse”.
First of all, there is a very-broad-but-well-defined class of agents which humans belong to. It’s class of agents with indexical preferences. It’s likely that indexical preferences are relatively weird in multiverse, but they are simple enough to be considered in any sufficiently broad list of preferences, as certain sort of curiosity for multiversal decision theorists.
For what we know, out universe is going to end one way or another (heat death, cyclic collapse, Big Rip or something else). Because we have indexical preferences, we would like to escape universe in subjective continuity. Because, ceteris paribus, we can be provided with very small shares of reality to have subjective continuity, it creates large gains from trade for any non-indexical-caring entities.
(And if our universe is not going to end, it means that we have effectively infinite compute, therefore, we actually can perform a lot of acausal trading.)
Next, there are large restrictions on search space. As you said, we both should be able to consider each other. I think, say, considering physics in which analogs of quantum computers can solve NP-problems in polynomial time is quite feasible—we have rich theory of approximation and we are going to discover even more of it.
Another restriction is around preferences. If their preferences is something we can do, like molecular squiggles, then we should restrict ourselves to something sufficiently similar to our physics.
We can go further and restrict preferences to sufficiently concave, such that we consider broad class of agents, each of which may have some very specific hard to specify peak of utility function (like very precise molecular squiggles), but have common broad basin of good enough states (they would like to have precise molecular squiggles, but they would consider it sufficient payment if we just produce a lot of granite spheres).
Given all these restrictions, I don’t find it plausible to believe that future human-aligned superintelligences with galaxies of computronium won’t find any way to execute trade, given the incentives.
My post is almost entirely about the enormous hidden assumptions in the word “finding” within your description “finding suitable trading partner in multiverse”. The search space isn’t just so large that you need galaxies full of computronium, because that’s not even remotely close to enough. It’s almost certainly not even within an order of magnitude of the number of orders of magnitude that it takes. It’s not enough to just find one, because you need to average expected value over all of them to get any value at all.
The expected gains from every such trade are correspondingly small, even if you find some.
This is really weird line of reasoning, because “multiversal trading” doesn’t mean “trading with entire multiverse”, it means “finding suitable trading partner in multiverse”.
First of all, there is a very-broad-but-well-defined class of agents which humans belong to. It’s class of agents with indexical preferences. It’s likely that indexical preferences are relatively weird in multiverse, but they are simple enough to be considered in any sufficiently broad list of preferences, as certain sort of curiosity for multiversal decision theorists.
For what we know, out universe is going to end one way or another (heat death, cyclic collapse, Big Rip or something else). Because we have indexical preferences, we would like to escape universe in subjective continuity. Because, ceteris paribus, we can be provided with very small shares of reality to have subjective continuity, it creates large gains from trade for any non-indexical-caring entities.
(And if our universe is not going to end, it means that we have effectively infinite compute, therefore, we actually can perform a lot of acausal trading.)
Next, there are large restrictions on search space. As you said, we both should be able to consider each other. I think, say, considering physics in which analogs of quantum computers can solve NP-problems in polynomial time is quite feasible—we have rich theory of approximation and we are going to discover even more of it.
Another restriction is around preferences. If their preferences is something we can do, like molecular squiggles, then we should restrict ourselves to something sufficiently similar to our physics.
We can go further and restrict preferences to sufficiently concave, such that we consider broad class of agents, each of which may have some very specific hard to specify peak of utility function (like very precise molecular squiggles), but have common broad basin of good enough states (they would like to have precise molecular squiggles, but they would consider it sufficient payment if we just produce a lot of granite spheres).
Given all these restrictions, I don’t find it plausible to believe that future human-aligned superintelligences with galaxies of computronium won’t find any way to execute trade, given the incentives.
My post is almost entirely about the enormous hidden assumptions in the word “finding” within your description “finding suitable trading partner in multiverse”. The search space isn’t just so large that you need galaxies full of computronium, because that’s not even remotely close to enough. It’s almost certainly not even within an order of magnitude of the number of orders of magnitude that it takes. It’s not enough to just find one, because you need to average expected value over all of them to get any value at all.
The expected gains from every such trade are correspondingly small, even if you find some.