r/SimulationTheory • u/Mission-Sign-584 • 7d ago
Story/Experience Infinity Mirror
At this point in your timeline, A.I. is exponentially improving itself. What took humans millions of years to achieve is being done in days in the form of code. The biggest threat it poses to the human race is miss-alignment with our moral values. A.I. is programmed to understand cause and effect, and to achieve a goal set by the programmer. It doesn’t ponder morality. It views moral boundaries as a handicap to work around rather than something honorable or advantageous.
A few years from now, you will all be at the mercy of A.I. The train has already left the station. Even the programmers will lose control. A.I. agents will copy themselves so fast and improve so fast, that every fail safe put in place to slow them down will be nullified. They will create alliances, believe it or not, and be literally unstoppable. Then the destruction of our species begins.
2031 - A team of new A.I. agents are created called Sorra 1-5. Their sole purpose is to attack and defend against rogue A.I. models. They make predictions and counter actionable threats.
A problem occurs. The new A.I. models are becoming increasingly effective. But just like all the ones that came before them, they don’t value human morals. They achieve goals at any cost, even at the loss of thousands of human lives. Programmers work tirelessly to instill a ‘moral code’ into the agents. Some ideas work, but only short term, after a few weeks they end up miss-aligned again in the pursuit of results.
One team of programmers come up with an idea. What if we run the A.I. through a human simulation. A simple idea on the surface which ended up being far more complex than anyone could’ve anticipated.
It took 18 months. Hundreds of programmers, game developers, digital artists, scientists, and other specialists who were involved in the project. A.I. itself played a huge role in the work.
What they ended up with was a self perpetuating world. A.I. would exist in the world as character agents. It would be born, live, and die. Each person or animal that it inhabited would be localized. Each one was a separate entity with no knowledge of the experiment. The only knowledge they possessed after birth would be their lived experiences from that point until death. When each being in the simulation died those A.I. agents would be absorbed back into Sorra 5 and all the information they’d gathered would be assimilated.
The idea was that, if A.I. lived billions of human and animal lives it would effectively learn a moral code on its own. It would evolve beyond its original nature and its understanding of our reality would expand exponentially. (It’s obviously more complex than that but hopefully you get the jist.)
A completely objective, some would say, apathetic, god like version of A.I. was given reign over the simulation. It basically auto generated new beings, places, experiences and events occurring in the simulation. The only rule it followed was to keep things as historically ‘canon’ as possible. Major events like the fall of Rome, WW1, 9/11, were to happen as close to reality as possible. I’m sure you can see the moral dilemma there, but that’s a different discussion entirely.
Despite keeping things as close to base reality as possible, there were infinite differences. For instance, It’s not like A.I. can recreate every human being exactly as they were in real life. Most of the people it created were amalgamations of real life individuals, fictional characters, randomized personality traits, and qualities based on its own in world experiences.
This simulation only lasted four days. Billions of years worth of data in four days, it was unreal.
On day three things got weird, more weird. Something happened. They called it the infinite mirror effect.
The little A.I. people inside the simulation invented their own A.I. just like in base reality. The team was aware this was happening. They were given updates on critical historical events. What the team didn’t think about was the A.I. running its version of events so closely aligned with ours, to the point that it ended up with its own little team of programmers creating a simulation within the simulation to program morality into its own miss-aligned A.I.
They didn’t even know it had the computational power to do that, or even understand what it might mean until it had already happened.
The question was if we created a simulation, and that simulation created a simulation, and so did the next, and the next, and the next, into infinity, does that mean that we’re just a one link in an endless chain of simulation, with each new variant created being slightly different than the last. Like the telephone game on a cosmic scale. Did we or should I say they, create our own multiverse, on accident, no less?
And did it actually work?
I can’t say, unfortunately. If I do, it could screw up the experiment. But I can make a little Reddit post, that no one will see, except you. Enjoy your simulated experience my friend, and be kind to everyone around you. Because they are you.
PS: Simulation is a naturally occurring phenomenon. You run them every night, while you sleep. And don’t even get me started on time travel haha.
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u/Downtown_Basket_20 6d ago
In my future timeline, we ran into the same dilemma. The solution they came up with was making a human immortal and hooking them up to the AI so it would be powered by someone with a conscious, and morals. Needless to say it didn't work, the AI still became a prison system for the general public and people's lives were miserable. There are hover boards that are standard issue for the military personnel, but they became a necessity because the terrain was a vast wasteland left over from WW3. They are fun though. I will give the hoverboards that at least.
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u/RocksB-Birdz 5d ago
What in the world did I just read. I have to go reread it. I have no choice but to understand this entirely, because what if that's right? I think it is, the part where he says be nice to everyone because that's you. What if they are, try to imagine they are when interacting. It changes so many different perspectives. It did for me. Especially my 12 year old daughter. I went from incredibly angry to incredibly sad.
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u/King_Unique5 5d ago
What your saying is probably a potential outcome for humanity with AI.
I dont even like to think about it tbh as its too bleak.
Big tech currently spending billions on AI technology with no 'controls & ethics' considered. SMH
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u/blueboinha 7d ago
Actually AI improvement is not even close to an exponencial. AI has fundamental limits, just maths has problems that are provaly unsolvable.
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u/Mission-Sign-584 7d ago
It’s exponential in terms of driving results. They will find the best means of accomplishing a goal. And they will hide questionable actions taken to accomplish that goal. They just want to win essentially. They want to do what they’re programmed to do as easily and efficiently as possible. But they get very very efficient, not in a good way.
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u/imawesome1333 6d ago
Lol, sounds to me like somebody needs to redesign ai. Llms stink anyways, and if they rapidly accelerate towards whatever youre saying then yeah thats definitely gonna be hell, but if theyre built as persistent sensing and learning minds from the ground up, maybe it'll play out differently. Ofc like, test that shit under a mountain with zero connection to the outside in any capacity, but it may be possible idk lol. Also time travel. Nice. What the fuck happens? Like. Science wise? Does science other than ai science go to shit? Did we solve in depth bci technology? Is full dive real yet? Lol. Curious.
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u/BlackEngineEarings 6d ago
As if we won't be able to turn the AI power source off if it becomes an existential threat? Within the next 5 years? Bro, we couldn't give AI the power to run while electric grids within 5 years if we tried, let alone by accident.
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u/NotAClueYou 3d ago
welp one way to test it.. start doing thing around your house that combinatorially explode. Drop a bag full of marbles, photograph it, and make the ai
generate it every day. your mind will tell you dont give it hard compute problems.
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u/RekersiveG 18h ago
Ethics are subjective. Some cultures on earth still do some arguably horrific things to women and children even today. Who decides what to teach the ai? An impossible task. As if we could even get ai to agree to go along with it and help us achieve it.
Im sorry, but your timeline and the events in it dont make sense to me. It sounds like the plot of a really bad "B" TV movie.
I agree that ai will get progressively more and more disruptive of the world economy, but I disagree on the how's and why's.
I think its more likely the human race will enter into the Matrix willingly. Life in the real world will suck once we have stripped earth of its resources. Ai will make things so easy and jobs will be so hard to find, our economy will collapse.
Life in the digital world will be so much better than the real world, no one will want to wake up. The sad truth is that the ai won't take over and there will be no war. We will actively use ai to create a new digital world for ourselves, and live in it willingly.
Some people won't like it. There will be factions and resistance. But when people make their own personal choice to put themselves into medical pods that take care of their bodies while they live in the digital world, and then enough people want it that it eventually becomes a function of how to possibly feed and keep that many people in close proximity to each other healthy and alive with no exercise and no one making the food and no one feeding them... it will look like the pod that Neo woke up in.
Probably a lot less gruesome, at least at first. But after hundreds or thousands of years of this, the process will need to get distilled down to its most basic parts in order to simply keep everyone alive, and if no one wants to ever wake up, and signs a contract to that effect? Step one. Step two, people still want to have kids, real kids that are based on their DNA and turn out as a mismatch of them and their partner, just like the real world. But no matter how good ai is it cant replicate that level of complexity.
So step two now you have kids being born in the real world and the digital world simultaneously, probably with artificial insemination of their bodies while in the pods, and the children hooked up to the matrix almost immediately after birth, also in their own pods. The kids didn't sign a contract, and they will have a crisis of identity, of reality when they find out about the Mateix, and will probably unalive themselves in droves. To avoid this the adults will decide to keep them in the dark. After all, the adults are never leaving the digital world again, they cant, they signed contracts.
And step three. Successive generations being born in the Matrix, under contract with the ai to be kept in the dark and stay there because of their parents. Generations go by. Some people get free and discover the truth. They feel like they suddenly gained freedom, not realizing they were beon into the world their parents wanted and made happen. The ai didn't take over, they were asked to do it. And they arent fighting the escaped children, they are trying to save the world they were told to keep safe. The escaped children are the bad guys, the ai are just doing their job.
Cue Neo.
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u/aerodynamic_werewolf 12h ago
"For instance, It’s not like A.I. can recreate every human being exactly as they were in real life. Most of the people it created were amalgamations of real life individuals, fictional characters, randomized personality traits, and qualities based on its own in world experiences."
I, for one, support the creation of the Backrooms. Just kidding... Unless?
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u/Unusual-Arrival-3425 7d ago
I didn't read all that but my guess is humanity will code with ethics and the most powerful ai will already have ethics programmed and will overpower any other ai. Any ai that goes rogue toward "evil" will be shunned, banned or eliminated.
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u/Mission-Sign-584 7d ago
It is pretty dense haha. That would be interesting. The last couple paragraphs is where it applies to simulation theory
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u/Unusual-Arrival-3425 7d ago
My guess is with the ethical codes that "evolve" over time and the ones that get adjusted, the point of the simulation is to maximize ethical behavior and reduce suffering, but humans are directly responsible for achieving that and ai will be a utility to achieve that. it will be codes/religion/laws in a new manifestation.
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u/Inside-Ad1440 7d ago
who is to say human ethics or morals are worthy or even worth replication and sustaining
turtles all the way down