This and other simulation arguments become more plausible if you assume that they require only a tiny fraction of the compute needed to simulate physical reality. Which I think is true. I don’t think it takes nearly as much compute to run a useful simulation of humans as people usually assume.
I don’t see a reason to simulate at nearly a physical level of detail. I suspect you can do it using a technique that’s more similar to the simulations you describe, except for the brains involved, which need to be simulated in detail to make decisions like evolved organisms would. But that detail is on the order of computations, not molecules. Depending on which arguments you favor, a teraflop or a couple OOMs above might be enough to simulate a brain with adequate fidelity to capture its decision-making to within the large uncertainty of exactly what type of organisms might evolve.
“physical” reality can be simulated in very low fidelity relative to atoms, because it’s not the important part for this and many proposed simulation purposes. It just has to be enough to fool the brains involved. And brains naturally fill in details as part of their fundamental computational operation.
For this purpose you’d also want to get the basic nature of computing right, because that’s might well have a large effect on what type of AGI is created. But that doesn’t mean you need to simulate the electrons doiing quantum tunneling for wafer transistors; it just means you need to constrain the simmulation so the compute behaves approximately like the quantum tunneling transistor is the base technology.
On this thesis, the compute needed is mostly that needed to run the brains involved.
This isn’t a necessary twist, but one might even cut corners by not even simulating all humans in full fidelity. All of society does play in to the factors in the AGI race, but it’s possible that that an AGI could run many times more simulations if they made only key decision-makers simulated in full fidelity and somehow scaled down others. However, I want to separate this even weirder possibility from both the main argument of the post and my main argument here: simulation for many purposes can probably be many, many OOMs smaller than the atomic level—possibly using very few resources if a lot of technology and energy is available for compute.
I’ll make a separate comment on the actual thesis of this post. TLDR: I find this far more compelling than other variants of the simulation argument.
This and other simulation arguments become more plausible if you assume that they require only a tiny fraction of the compute needed to simulate physical reality. Which I think is true. I don’t think it takes nearly as much compute to run a useful simulation of humans as people usually assume.
I don’t see a reason to simulate at nearly a physical level of detail. I suspect you can do it using a technique that’s more similar to the simulations you describe, except for the brains involved, which need to be simulated in detail to make decisions like evolved organisms would. But that detail is on the order of computations, not molecules. Depending on which arguments you favor, a teraflop or a couple OOMs above might be enough to simulate a brain with adequate fidelity to capture its decision-making to within the large uncertainty of exactly what type of organisms might evolve.
“physical” reality can be simulated in very low fidelity relative to atoms, because it’s not the important part for this and many proposed simulation purposes. It just has to be enough to fool the brains involved. And brains naturally fill in details as part of their fundamental computational operation.
For this purpose you’d also want to get the basic nature of computing right, because that’s might well have a large effect on what type of AGI is created. But that doesn’t mean you need to simulate the electrons doiing quantum tunneling for wafer transistors; it just means you need to constrain the simmulation so the compute behaves approximately like the quantum tunneling transistor is the base technology.
On this thesis, the compute needed is mostly that needed to run the brains involved.
This isn’t a necessary twist, but one might even cut corners by not even simulating all humans in full fidelity. All of society does play in to the factors in the AGI race, but it’s possible that that an AGI could run many times more simulations if they made only key decision-makers simulated in full fidelity and somehow scaled down others. However, I want to separate this even weirder possibility from both the main argument of the post and my main argument here: simulation for many purposes can probably be many, many OOMs smaller than the atomic level—possibly using very few resources if a lot of technology and energy is available for compute.
I’ll make a separate comment on the actual thesis of this post. TLDR: I find this far more compelling than other variants of the simulation argument.