What’s so much better about the “real” substrate, as opposed to the simulated one, that makes such an attempt worth investing the massive resources it must take to build all these computers—and commit to using them for torture?
The “trade” that the aliens are proposing seems to be as follows: you have something we want, namely a rather inefficient world capable of supporting ten billion. We have a substrate capable of convincingly simulating trillions of people. Give us your inefficient world or we will devote our efficient substrate to making many copies of your folk miserable.
This trade has strange payouts. The “no deal” case (putatively) creates massive loss for us, but also for the aliens—they lose the benefit of using the substrate for their own purposes AND they don’t gain our world. The “deal” case disposes of all humanity and gains the aliens a tiny slice of elbow room.
If you do care about what happens to simulations, a better trade would be to let us use the substrate to support a population in the trillions, in exchange for the use of our smaller world.
Me, I’d rather be alive in a simulation (barring torture) than dead in the real world.
What’s so much better about the “real” substrate, as opposed to the simulated one, that makes such an attempt worth investing the massive resources it must take to build all these computers—and commit to using them for torture?
The “trade” that the aliens are proposing seems to be as follows: you have something we want, namely a rather inefficient world capable of supporting ten billion. We have a substrate capable of convincingly simulating trillions of people. Give us your inefficient world or we will devote our efficient substrate to making many copies of your folk miserable.
This trade has strange payouts. The “no deal” case (putatively) creates massive loss for us, but also for the aliens—they lose the benefit of using the substrate for their own purposes AND they don’t gain our world. The “deal” case disposes of all humanity and gains the aliens a tiny slice of elbow room.
If you do care about what happens to simulations, a better trade would be to let us use the substrate to support a population in the trillions, in exchange for the use of our smaller world.
Me, I’d rather be alive in a simulation (barring torture) than dead in the real world.