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Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

That's quite contrived in my opinion. How can people uploaded into a simulation maintain that level of control in the physical world for any durable period?

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They have to keep up all the computing infrastructure running the simulation, and deal with long-term threats like geological activity and asteroids. That requires having and maintaining considerable technology out in the real world, and if only a mere 10% refuse to enter the simulation, then that minority may not get to benefit from spacefaring technology, or have the capital or industrial base to develop their own.

In fact, since spacefaring presents a threat (kinetic bombardment) to any planetary-bound species, then that majority who choose to enter the simulation may want to expressly prevent the minority from leaving the planet.

This is obviously not impossible, but we are now in the realm of adding clauses to an already rather specific scenario, each clause adding another degree of improbability. (The odds of "an upload cult arises on a planet" is by definition greater than "an upload cult arises on a planet AND actively presents anybody else on the planet from ever leaving.)

I think the metaphor to look to isn't necessarily even human civilizations spreading around the globe; it's life spreading through the planet to colonize every niche out of which the slightest scrap of energy can be extracted.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier for the non-uploaders to, you know, just pull the plug? Or change the input to the digital existances in a way to simulate a reality "outside"?

No, because – as I mentioned above – the uploaders would still maintaining all kinds of technology to monitor and control the outside world in order to ward off any threats (natural disasters, sabotage from the non-uploaders) to the computing infrastructure on which the simulations are running. If the majority of society chooses to upload, then that suggests that such protective infrastructure is already so stable and advanced, that the non-uploaders would be powerless to simply "pull the plug".

You're getting very close to ending up with the script to The Matrix.

Software eats the world; control the software.

It's an interesting question. How do people maintain control now? In general, it is not through physical control. We have institutions, we have "manufacturing consent".

We have those in a negative sense. Manufactured consent is mostly about directing motivation towards wars of control and acquisition and preventing other activities - including the peaceful development of sustainable energy, which is finally happening fifty years after it could have, and non-corporate non-military access to space on top of a non-corporate internet, neither of which are happening at all.

Manufacturing positive consent for a billion-year project is - obviously - a completely different kind of problem.

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