? (I hit the title character limit)

      • JGrffn@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Consciousness existing everywhere is the simplest explanation that fits the known fact: that consciousness exists here.

            • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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              1 year ago

              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.

  • ZeroCool@feddit.ch
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Riskable@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      An AI would decide that an AI-driven dictatorship would be most effective at implementing whatever goals you gave it.

      • paddirn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • LufyCZ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • OpenStars@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      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”.

  • shootwhatsmyname@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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

    • 30p87@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The fastest way has probably been economical destabilization, as it’s the easiest way to use the feelings of people. Then one could gain status in a country and exploit legal systems to gain dictator status. Would work with some systems, and some are more resistant to arbitrary exploitation now. You could also combine the peoples mistrust with external pressure such as threats of war so that they try to overthrow their own government and fail to create a working system again.

  • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • The_Cleanup_Batter@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      Not to worry, only five trillionaires will have access and I’m sure their motives will be completely altruistic.

      • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        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!

  • Kowowow@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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

    • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Kowowow@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure what 9/11 you lived through that brought on the national fashion gestapo

        • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          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!

  • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Run an infinite number of universe simulations at a speed of one vigintillion years per second (that particular number is useless unless attempting to calculate the heat death of the universe, like the number of subatomic particles, or even quantum particles in the universe is several orders of magnitude smaller than 1E^126. So every 1 to 2 seconds I would have simulated an infinite number of universes from Big Bang to The Heat Death of The Universe, so Holy Mother of Batman levels of atrocities and death going on here until I brute force an answer), until a species ends entropy, or attempts to escape the simulation. In the second case, end the simulation, in the first print out a translated tech manual and all relevant scientific and mathematical materials that would be needed for us to understand this technology within one decade.

    This is the infinite monkeys and typewriters thought experiment taken to its logical conclusion. I don’t suspect that I’m the first to think of this, and do suspect I am not part of the prime universe.