Nick Bostrom once argued that you must choose between three options re the possibility that you are now actually living in and experiencing a simulation created by future folks to explore their past: (A) its true, you are most likely a sim person living in a sim, either of this sort or another, (B) future folk will never be able to do this, because it just isn’t possible, they die first, or they never get rich and able enough, or (C) future folk can do this, but they do not choose to do it much, so that most people experiencing a world like yours are real humans now, not future sim people.
This argument seems very solid to me: future folks either do it, can’t do it, or choose not to. If you ask folks to pick from these options you get a simple pattern of responses:
Bostrom said are only 3 options (A) you live in a simulation, (B) future won’t get rich/able enough to make many sim people, (C) future folk will have little interest in making sims of people from your historical era. Which is right, or (D) is Bostrom wrong & other options exist?
— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) August 21, 2020
Here we see 40% in denial, hoping for another option, and the others about equally divided among the three options. But if you ask people to estimate the chances of each option, a different picture emerges. Lognormal distributions (which ignore the fact that chances can’t exceed 100%) are decent fits to these distributions, and here are their medians:
0.11% (A) now living in sim
347% (B) future not able
16% (C) future not choose
27% (D) argument wrong
So when we look at the people who are most confident that each option is wrong, we see a very different picture. Their strongest confidence, by far, is that they can’t possibly be living in a sim, and their weakest confidence, by a large margin, is that the future will be able to create sims. So if we go by confidence, poll respondents’ favored answer is that the future will either die soon or never grow beyond limited abilities, or that sims are just impossible.
My answer is that the future mostly won’t choose to sim us:
I doubt I’m living in a simulation, because I doubt the future is that interested in simulating us; we spend very little time today doing any sort of simulation of typical farming or forager-era folks, for example. (More)
If our descendants become better adapted to their new environment, they are likely to evolve to become rather different from us, so that they spend much less of their income on sim-like stories and games, and what sims they do like should be overwhelmingly of creatures much like them, which we just aren’t. Furthermore, if such creatures have near subsistence income, and if a fully conscious sim creature costs nearly as much to support as future creatures cost, entertainment sims containing fully conscious folks should be rather rare. (More)
If we look at all the ways that we today try to simulate our past, such as in stories and games, our interest in sims of particular historical places and times fades quickly with our cultural distance from them, and especially with declining influence over our culture. We are especially interested in Ancient Greece, Rome, China, and Egypt, because those places were most like us and most influenced us. But even so, we consume very few stories and games about those eras. And regarding all the other ancient cultures even less connected to us, we show far less interest.
As we look back further in time, we can track decline in both world population, and in our interest in stories and games about those eras. During the farming era population declined by about a factor of two every millennium, but it seems to me that our interest in stories and games of those eras declines much faster. There’s far less than half as much interest in 500AD than in 1500AD, and that fact continues for each 1000 year step backward.
So even if future folk make many sims of their ancestors, people like us probably aren’t often included. Unless perhaps we happen to be especially interesting.
Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, and Sparta/Ancient Greece are about equal in interest to the Renaissance American civil war and WW1 judging by google trends. Middle ages and ww2 are 3 an 10 times more popular. Napoleonic wars and dark ages and battle of agincourt are a sixth as popular. Seems more like there's a bunch of interest placed in a bunch of times. And we aren't sure how popular recent events will be in a century or 2. Don't get me wrong little interest pre writing , and this is comparing eras wars and battles, but it seems random.
Would honestly be interesting to get an interest per year metric. However the simulation argument works even if you're the only concious being, or we're in a multiplayer game stocked with people who just wanted to forget their lives for a day. Then it's just % time spent playing video games or number of characters made if the probability is per independent memory, rather then observer moments. And yeah people would prefer more interesting stuff to do, but we don't know what people will find interesting in the future.If we use how people use video games, movies , books or live their lives as an analogy; yeah some people are only going to want to be millionaires or billionaires, some people are going to want to be a general in a war,or soldiers in a war if they're thrill seekers/masochists, people might only want to be a king or some sort of leader. However there's also people who idealise a simple life, some people like a challenge or want to earn becoming wealthy.