Our world looks like it was optimized for entertainment.
My first case against this which comes to mind is that such evidence could be weak or emerge from survivorship bias instead of an actual simulation. Suppose that you see a random string of zeros and ones, but remember only parcels of length containing only zeros or of length containing only ones. If then the things which you remember would lead you to the erroneous conclusion of zeros being far more abundant.
For example, Pichai is the CEO of Google, not of GDM. The rise of clowns like Trump could have a benign explanation, especially given the careers of Javier Milei or former actors Reagan and Zelenskyy.
Additionally, I wonder if there are far more reasons to make a cheap simulation than an expensive one like ours. For example, if an ASI decides to do research around the singularity, then research is split into the part where the AI’s training data, architecture, RL intensity, eval methodology, etc. impact the AI’s alignment and incident frequency, the part where the AI’s training data is created and the part where lab employees think of ways to build the capable aligned AI while trying to outpace rivals and withstand pressure from governments. Having simulated governments[1] do their work could be cheapened by having them talk with husks or receive basic information around the outside world.
Finally, I would expect that carefully crafted simulations where the people struggle to notice that they are in a simulation require so much compute that many possibilities which you list are ruled out, like dreams of a higher being which isn’t you. Indeed, carefully simulating the 100B human lives of 1E15 FLOP/second each lasting at least around 30 years aka 1E9 seconds would mean investing 1E33 FLOP. Simulating 1M human lives and 100B husks (which also provide, at best, a thousandfold decrease in cost, since GPT-4o-mini requires at least 100B FLOP per token versus the 100T estimate from a human brain) risks creating friction between humans and husks.
P.S. I wonder what exactly is affected by the world being a simulation as opposed to not being a simulation. For example, if I made a simulation, then I don’t think that I’d make a big one or even alter the names of Chosen Ones like Musk. Instead, I would try to repurpose someone else’s simulation and to check how different backgrounds of a simulated human affect the ability to generate useful ideas in AI safety (e.g. my background is physics, math and unorthodox political-economical views).
P.P.S. I didn’t even notice puns like Alt(ernative to )man or PichAI. Maybe one could do experiments with, say, deliberately finding Russian puns in novels whose human author couldn’t have inserted them because he wasn’t supposed to know Russian, let alone make puns?
My first case against this which comes to mind is that such evidence could be weak or emerge from survivorship bias instead of an actual simulation. Suppose that you see a random string of zeros and ones, but remember only parcels of length
For example, Pichai is the CEO of Google, not of GDM. The rise of clowns like Trump could have a benign explanation, especially given the careers of Javier Milei or former actors Reagan and Zelenskyy.
Additionally, I wonder if there are far more reasons to make a cheap simulation than an expensive one like ours. For example, if an ASI decides to do research around the singularity, then research is split into the part where the AI’s training data, architecture, RL intensity, eval methodology, etc. impact the AI’s alignment and incident frequency, the part where the AI’s training data is created and the part where lab employees think of ways to build the capable aligned AI while trying to outpace rivals and withstand pressure from governments. Having simulated governments[1] do their work could be cheapened by having them talk with husks or receive basic information around the outside world.
Finally, I would expect that carefully crafted simulations where the people struggle to notice that they are in a simulation require so much compute that many possibilities which you list are ruled out, like dreams of a higher being which isn’t you. Indeed, carefully simulating the 100B human lives of 1E15 FLOP/second each lasting at least around 30 years aka 1E9 seconds would mean investing 1E33 FLOP. Simulating 1M human lives and 100B husks (which also provide, at best, a thousandfold decrease in cost, since GPT-4o-mini requires at least 100B FLOP per token versus the 100T estimate from a human brain) risks creating friction between humans and husks.
P.S. I wonder what exactly is affected by the world being a simulation as opposed to not being a simulation. For example, if I made a simulation, then I don’t think that I’d make a big one or even alter the names of Chosen Ones like Musk. Instead, I would try to repurpose someone else’s simulation and to check how different backgrounds of a simulated human affect the ability to generate useful ideas in AI safety (e.g. my background is physics, math and unorthodox political-economical views).
P.P.S. I didn’t even notice puns like Alt(ernative to )man or PichAI. Maybe one could do experiments with, say, deliberately finding Russian puns in novels whose human author couldn’t have inserted them because he wasn’t supposed to know Russian, let alone make puns?
And simulated labs, but they select for being smart, making it easier to notice a potential simulation.