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It's really weird that we find ourselves at the hinge of history. One proposed explanation is that we're part of an ancestor simulation. It makes sense that ancestor simulations would be focused on the hinge of history. But unless ancestor simulations make up a significant proportion of future minds, it's still weird that we find ourselves in a simulation rather than actually experiencing the future.
Why might ancestor simulations make up a significant proportion of future minds? One possible answer is that ancestor simulations provide the information required for acausal cooperation across large worlds (known as ECL). If knowing the values that civilizations developed after the hinge of history allowed you to trade with them, then civilizations should focus a significant proportion of their resources on simulating the hinges of history experienced by many other civilizations.
I presume that this explanation has been proposed before, and probably in more detail; links appreciated if so.
An additional part of the story is that if a superintelligence want to compute the distribution of outcomes of an intelligent civilization doing a singularity, it will want to sample histories leading to the singularity. But these histories have a branching tree structure.
Suppose you've already simulated the evolution of life and humanity up to the singularity, and you're interested in other nearby ways it could have played out. You could simulate the whole thing again, but that's probably unnecessary. Computationally che... (read more)