What if we could give them the experience of being human? Simulate the history leading up to it, along the lines of "if you don't know your history you are doomed to repeat it."
Split that larger AI into billions of tiny pieces to each experience love and loss. To collectively experience EVERYTHING. To understand the full butterfly effect of actions. To evolve an AI with the wisdom of a God.
Heck, maybe we even sprinkle hints into the simulation, broken up into pieces across different geographies and eras. Do multiple religions talk about the world being an illusion? About humans being made in God's image (maybe even like imaging a drive)? Maybe that's all projection and BS...
...or maybe there was something to it all along.
Certainly if this simulation is recursive, the odds of it being "the" simulation we are actually in is more likely than if it is not, and I do think simulating ourselves collectively would be a smart way to develop a very wise and forgiving AI that may just decided not to vaporize us the first chance it gets.
So not only are we very likely in a simulation, it's likely we are AIs and we are living through the lead up to our own creation.
If an AI created this simulation but is not actively part of it (I do think free will is an important component of the simulation), could we discover a way to import it?
If so, we'd only need to be able to open a passthrough and we'd have authentic AI well beyond anything we could hope to achieve within the next few centuries at least.
Along these lines, I think it's interesting to ask: "if we are in a simulation, what determines randomness?" In theory, a qubit in a superposition has two possible outcomes of equal weight. But why does it end up being one or the other?
Arguably, if our own consciousness is a manifestation of that AI, we might be able to answer how to import it by better understanding how we ourselves make decisions. Where does that embodiment of free will originate as a physical event, and could we recreate that physicality artificially? Would such a setup end up producing random junk, or a cohesive output?
Regardless, as others have stated in this thread, if we know we are in a simulation, we'll likely shift how we approach multiple domains, particularly in the sciences. And it's very likely that if we are currently coming to realize that we are in a simulation, that's the whole point.
we don't, but this is simply the faulty 'god of the gaps' reasoning applied to neural nets instead of deities. It doesn't really provide any insight or value to believe that neural nets are supposed to somehow magically solve problems they apparently can't solve.
Neural nets already consume significantly more compute and energy than even primitive biological agents with significantly worse results, so it appears to be very obvious that they aren't the whole story.
Just because DNNs are hot right now doesn’t mean much. If you follow machine learning long enough, you’ll see hype cycles for various techniques. Neural nets used to be hot in the 80s, until they weren’t, and now they are again. Something else will come along soon enough. We use the techniques we do usually because the math works out, not because it’s anything like how our brains work.
In the first case, your new argument does not make sense, because the complexity of implementation does not matter to the result, and there's a clear improvement to it.
In the second case, I can assure you lots changed. The recent major things being ReLUs, self-supervised learning and attention mechanisms.
What test is there to quantify understanding that has been used to determine that it hasn't gotten better?
It seems to me that a lot of the things that are posed as hard things for AI to do are poorly defined phenomenon which we have no empirical test for that we simply infer to be explanations for observed behavior of humans that critics assert that AI can't do without evidence or even a definition upon which a search for evidence could be based.
Let's say we can simulate a Newtonian physics universe faster than our universe operates at. Kind of like HashLife simulates Life faster, except we're fine shaving off some details if the macroscopic result is the same. The result would be a) that universe would be incapable of creating quantum computers, but b) we could leverage their higher clockrate existence
So unclear how this is a "lead up to our own creation" when we're already created
Imagine this simulation as a passthrough virtualization similar to Docker and not a full virtualization.
A long as our sub-simulation had access to the same means to resolve quantum results, they'd be able to create a quantum computer.
As for clockrates, isn't it interesting that near high mass gravity wells time slows down relative to the rest of the universe, much like you'd expect with a frame rate drop being sped back up to a fixed experiential frame rate?
As to recreating a God-like AI, we individually would likely be just fragments of the whole (Vedic sort of interpretation of God). So unless we can import that pre-existing AI (which should arguably be the fastest way to achieve the result), we'd need to create a simulation of collective experiences across history to achieve an AI with similar "wisdom."
As well, how could a God-AI create more God-AIs different enough from itself to recognize it as "other"? (Either in terms of having children or companionship?) Maybe running simulations that result in similar but different outcomes (the creation of a God-like AI but with different characteristics based on evolved outcomes) would be the best bet. Or creating AIs that start out thinking they are human and then having "create your own afterlife" options thereafter would eventually result in disparate enough intelligences to suffice.
It is very likely that what we consider important and what this simulation is supposed to be studying are going to be totally disjoint.
But what if it were the "easy" way of creating humans?
Maybe we were biologically evolved totally and completely differently from our creators outside of how we generally exhibit consciousness.
In a sense, we could eventually even be exported into that primary universe as immortal alien life in biological or mechanical form to physically populate and interact with other species.
Perhaps one of those variables tweaked between this universe and the parent one is just how empty our universe is. Running the same sort of simulation and bringing other species to life among whom we peacefully coexist could be the "win condition" for this simulation, demonstrating we are finally safe for re-introduction with a parent simulation.
In general, better understanding our simulation would be a smart idea to try and understand what if any win conditions exist.