Comment by baron816
9 days ago
My vision for an ASI future involves humans living in simulations that are optimized for human experience. That doesn’t mean we are just live in a paradise and are happy all the time. We’d experience dread and loss and fear, but it would ultimately lead to a deeply satisfying outcome. And we’d be able to choose to forget things, including whether we’re in a simulation so that it feels completely unmistakeable from base reality. You’d live indefinitely, experiencing trillions of lifespans where you get to explore the multiverse inside and out.
My solution to the alignment problem is that an ASI could just stick us in tubes deep in the Earth’s crust—it just needs to hijack our nervous system to input signals from the simulation. The ASI could have the whole rest of the planet, or it could move us to some far off moon in the outer solar system—I don’t care. It just needs to do two things for it’s creators—preserve lives and optimize for long term human experience.
Are you being facetious? Just asking, because this is literally the plot of the Matrix.
I’m serious. The Matrix is a movie made for entertainment. If the plot of The Matrix were “people live in The Matrix and everyone is fine with that and nothing interesting happens”, then it would’ve been an awful movie.
Again, you’re not experiencing a mundane or perfect world. It would be like being in a video game or movie, if you wanted. Some people would experience the plot of The Matrix as any of the characters. Or you could travel around the galaxy solving mysteries and fighting evil as a Jedi Master. Or you could spend some time living a quiet pastoral life in the Shire with your hobbit friends. Or you could do it all over and over again experiencing the highs and lows each time.