carado.moe

tammy's blog about
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you can't simulate the universe from the beginning?

QACI and plausibly PreDCA rely on a true name of phenomena in the real world using solomonoff induction, and thus talk about locating them in a theoretical giant computation of the universe, from the beginning. it's reasonable to be concerned that there isn't enough compute for an aligned AI to actually do this. however, i have two responses:

• isn't there enough compute? supposedly, our past lightcone is a lot smaller than our future lightcone, and quantum computers seem to work. this is evidence that we can, at least in theory, build within our future lightcone a quantum computer simulating our past lightcone. the major hurdle here would be "finding out" a fully explanatory "initial seed" of the universe, which could take exponential time, but also could maybe not.
• we don't need to simulate past lightcone. if you ask me what my neighbor was thinking yesterday at noon, the answer is that i don't know! the world might be way too complex to figure that out without simulating it and scanning his brain. however, i have a reasonable distribution over guesses. he was more likely to think about french things than korean things. he was more likely to think about his family than my family. et cetera. an aligned superintelligence can hold an ever increasingly refined distribution of guesses, and then maximize the expected utility of utility functions corresponding to each guess.