? (I hit the title character limit)
If everything is being perfectly simulated, most things would still be unethical.
Not if consciousness isn’t an emerging phenomena.
If everything is perfectly simulated, the rules that allow consciousness to emerge are also there, and thus consciousness would emerge, regardless of whether it’s a simulation or reality. If we only simulate a consciousness without laws of reality, that consciousness would still be designed to mimic a consciousness from a reality with laws (ours), and since it would be a perfect simulation (and it would have to be so in order to run meaningful tests), that consciousness might as well be as real as us. Thus, unethical.
It’s a pre-existing phenomenon.
We don’t know that.
Consciousness existing everywhere is the simplest explanation that fits the known fact: that consciousness exists here.
Well we only know that we are conscious ourselves, there are no actual proof that anyone else is conscious. I mean it’s probable, but not proven.
So the only thing I can be sure about is that I am conscious, not that anyone else is.
Run simulations on what the best system of governance would be. You’d want to test across different cultures/countries/technological eras to get an idea of what the most resilient would be, maybe you’d get different results depending on what you were testing. Even the definition of “best system” would need alot of clarification.
An AI would decide that an AI-driven dictatorship would be most effective at implementing whatever goals you gave it.
You’d obviously need to give it constraints such as “administrable by humans” and if you’re looking at different technological eras, AI wouldn’t be available to something like 99% of humanity.
It wouldn’t be the worst idea to come out of it, to be honest.
Why bother with simulations of governance systems and not governance itself at that point?
I do understand “the risk” of putting AI being the steering wheel but if you’re already going to be trusting it this far, the last step probably doesn’t actually matter.
That leaves too much room for subjective interpretation - like ultimately the answer as to what system of governance will last the longest in a steady state will ofc be to kill all humans (bc that lasts for infinite time, and you can’t beat that kind of longevity!), while if you add the constraint that at least some must remain alive, it would be to enslave all humans (bc otherwise they’ll find some way to mess everything up), and if there is something added in there about being “happy” (more or less) then it becomes The Matrix (trick them into thinking they are happy, bc they cannot handle any real responsibility).
Admittedly, watching the USA election cycle (or substitute that with most other nations lately; or most corporate decisions work just as well for this) has made me biased against human decision making:-P. Like objectively speaking, Trump proved himself to be the “better” candidate than Hillary Clinton a few years ago (empirically I mean, you know, by actually winning), then he lost to Biden, but now there’s a real chance that Trump may win again, if Biden continues to forget which group he is addressing and thus makes it easy to spin the thought that he is so old as to be irrelevant himself and a vote for him is in reality one for Kamala Harris (remember, facts such as Trump’s own age would only be relevant for liberals, but conservatives do not base their decisions based on such trifling matters, it’s all about “gut feelings” and instincts there, so Biden is “old” while Trump is “not” - capiche?). Or in corporate politics, Reddit likewise “won” the protests.
Such experiments are going on constantly, and always have been for billions of years, and we are what came out of that:-D. Experiments with such socioeconomics have only gone on for a few thousand, but it will be interesting to see what survives.
Oh yeah no ethical problems there. Let’s just simulate a few billion people times a few thousand conditions and experiment with governmental structures.
Computer, determine how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie pop and if any owls try to interfere with the experiment kill them on sight.
It’s 1006. Source - young me
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Mine took around 750 or so. My tongue got so dry at some point it wasn’t doing much.
If the simulation is actually perfect, then it isn’t a simulation anymore and whatever would have been unethical in a non-simulated context would still be unethical.
I tailored my answers to that assumption. It’s a reality, even if a heavily-manipulated one, and the person(s) inside the simulation are as real as we are, given the description of “perfect simulation”.
It would be interesting to test how quickly you could completely dismantle a society’s order and infrastructure into total national collapse using a variety of pressures and tactics and rate each country with a score on how resilient they are
Edit: and might as well figure out the cure for cancer while we’re at it
Perfect simulations? So Laplace’s Demon? I suppose it would be most useful in doing a little bit of viewing the future. If you could call that useful. The existence of Laplace’s Demon basically disproves “free will” and anything viewed in the future would be set in stone and unavoidable. HOWEVER it could also potentially be used as a remote viewing device for any events that have already happened. Period. Yeah let’s see what the dinosaurs actually looked like. Sure we can take a firsthand look at the originating events of any major religion. Yep we can literally view any major crime exactly as it happened.
Depending on who has access to it, personal privacy becomes literally nonexistent.
Not to worry, only five trillionaires will have access and I’m sure their motives will be completely altruistic.
Simulate one human life, from beginning to end, in a way that allows unethical experiments to be dismissed as recurring nightmares by the individual, and not cause permanent damage to this simulated person. When their life ends, I’d arrange to talk to them, explain everything, apologize for the necessity of the experiments, and offer him immortality and/or freedom with no strings attached. He can get a biological or robot body, or stay virtual, but it’s not up to anyone but him/her/? at that point.
I’d be fine with my life being an experiment under those circumstances as long as the results were put mostly to saving or improving lives, but I’d never be willing to put someone else in that position if I didn’t; if you couldn’t find a person like myself in real life with that opinion on the possibility, it’s unjustifiable. If, however, you engineered their life just enough to strongly encourage that level of altruism, and made it comfortable and not dehumanizing when not involved in an experiment as well as having a ban on cruelty and gaslighting in doing the experiments, and apologize for having to resort to these measures at all, I could see the person not being overly upset.
Whether it meets the code of ethics for scientific research is another matter.
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What if it had continued?
Tarzan
I’d ask it how to reverse entropy.
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
I FOUND THE ANSWER, BUT YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE IT
Calculating… 404, problem “Entropy” not found. Please check the new information from the James Web Space telescope for possible reasons.
(look up “Trillion Year Old Universe” and realize that if true, that’s just how old the currently observable universe is, and reality as it is could be eternally going through cycles of stellar death and birth and would have always existed with no beginning)
Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
A man of culture.
Create a villain capable of defeating Data.
It’s all fun and games until someone uncouples the Heisenberg compensators.
Or breaks the glass on the Brownian flux capacitor.
…actually, what is the flux capacitor for, really? My theory is that it IS a real capacitor and thus related to energy storage/discharge.
How many times did the holodeck become real?
Always was
I swear they should have run a virus scan or CCleaner or something on that thing. Even the Glitch Techs don’t have a holodeck THAT buggy!
Everything exactly the same, except everyone has big naturals.
Hey I can’t see my food now!
Ways to make our future look more fantasy like such as bioengineered dragons, power crystals and cheat codes to reality in the form of magic
Only if I get to live in a treehouse that’s bigger on the inside, become my persona character, and dress like 9/11 never happened and Y2K aesthetic continued until '08 or longer.
I’m not sure what 9/11 you lived through that brought on the national fashion gestapo
The one that led to McBling and Reality TV. I wouldn’t try to force fashion to remain shiny bubblegum pop grafittipunk/shibiyapunk futurism to stick around or anything, I just think it had more staying power under normal conditions that was lost solely due to the nature of life from 2001-2008.
People don’t change fashion at the drop of a hat for financial crises, that just strengthens counterculture and futurism. They change their tastes suddenly when innocent people die in a new and unexpected way. That’s why art from the time period just before and during the Black Death is filled with more cynicism than even the past 7 years (roughly since Trump was elected), why an Oriental symbol of peace was ruined by the Nazis, and why the climate crisis has made FairPhone the only smartphone brand that survives without shoving ads down your throat.
Or at least, so it seems to me, I’m not a sociologist. What I also am not is petty or authoritarian, I’m not trying to make everyone wear 30 year old clothes or check their emails on an iLamp computer. I just know I’d like to see a world where people don’t have to rely on mass production to provide the things we need to live, because then you’re required to change your stuff out the moment it’s broken or obsolete.
My point is, I was trying to say your idea would make planned obsolescence and obsolescence in general themselves a relic of early civilization, so limiting such a world to one genre or style of product that only remains popular for ~10 years before becoming nothing but zeitgeist and nostalgia feels needlessly restrictive. I can see how it could be taken the opposite way, sorry about that!
Probably just run the whole universe backwards through time from its current state until it reaches some unchanging state, and then run it forwards again from the beginning.
In time lapse of course, I am a mortal after all.
Should be able to answer a metric shitton of astrophysics questions, at very least, which do happen to be some of the absolute most-asked and hardest-if-not-impossible-to-conclusively-answer questions in science. Period.
I’m not very creative. I’d use it to enrich myself and my family. However, I’d also use it to solve issues like diseases, cancer, battery tech (fast charge/long life), engines for space travel, more efficient solar tech, materials sciences, etc. I’d be rich AF. Doesn’t mean I can’t move the world forward in a beneficial way with my greed.
Well, at least you actually want to have a beneficial legacy. That’s better than we can say about Zuckerberg, Trump or Musk.
