Yet another comment on brain computer interfaces, abundance, and postscarcity society.

The thing is, AI will eventually accelerate the development of brain computer interfaces. Brain computer interfaces will eventually allow all the senses, all the sensations to be replicated digitally and stored accessible instantly. Like netflix and youtube do with video, or spotify with music. All sensations, taste, smell, touch, all realworld experiences will be recordable, shareable and able to be experienced again and again for free.

Control the brain, and you can eat the most nutritious food, and it doesn't matter how unpalatable it is, the signals will be intercepted and changed such that the food tastes as the best tasting possible food.

You can also eat thin air, and drink thin air, while consuming virtual food with all the richness of sensation and none of the calories. Even the most expensive of dishes, can be had unlimited as desired at a moment's notice, instantly, cost free.

It can also generate worlds of untold beauty and extense virtually. Sensations can be recorded, and shared even from other people. You can experience the emotions, the thoughts, the sense of making choices, the tastes, the smells, the sights, everything indistinguishable from living it yourself live in person, indistinguishable from real recordings, and imaginings of real and fictitious locations.

Say you take the world's richest person a 100 years from now, say he records his life from birth till death. A billion people could potentially experience it all, indistinguishable from being that person, and it would take virtually no resources to live and experience everything he did as vividly and realistically as if you actually were that person.
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The thing is eventually computation and ai will allow the development of alternate histories, to adapt to any possible choice. Such that you too could not only live the same life but make different choices, and experience realistic alternate outcomes or even an entirely fictional experience as a non existent wealthiest individual with free agency.

In any case there is no experience that cannot be recreated with computation, ai and a connection to the brain.

EDIT: People will be able to live in virtual worlds, and use augmented reality to mix the virtual with the real. Any fantasy or desire they have can be materialized by ai in digital form and transmitted directly to the brain at low cost.

People will share, and interact with each other while having access to the ability to exchange thought, emotion, and countless sensations and conjure up any food or experience or sight or sound, touch, smell out of thin air. A far more magical and richer social experience.

Today there are streamers. In the future it has been hypothesized there will be experience beamers, people that connect all their senses to the internet, and thousands or millions connect to their feed and feel all they're feeling.

But not everyone will follow experience beamers. There will be movies and interactive stories or games, where you're a bystander or you're a protagonist, in countless stories with wonderful worlds. Some of these experiences may last hours, other days, yet others may last years decades or more. Perhaps even your memories and personality will be temporarily blocked and overrided, if so desired.

Why would such tech become widely available? Because with the advanced manufacturing of the future it is likely to be practically free to mass produce. With full automation there is no need of employment, and basic needs can easily be met, population caps and regulated reproduction can ensure there are always enough resources to provide basic needs to everyone.

The wealthiest can still have an edge with having more physical land, better physical transportation, and the ability to conduct larger scale simulations with entire simulated billions of people to rule over with godlike power using their BCI. The less wealthier the smaller the scale and complexity of what can be produced, unless it is in a shared multi user experience where the costs are distributed.

Comment on thread on running simulations

I don't believe you actually can create such feelings, you can only access the memories of events. Simulation is only the creation of memory states and transitions between them, even with more elaborate branching of subsections, it is not different in kind than the playing of an interactive dvd. What happened happened and there's no changing it.

Those rapes and tortures they exist atemporally forever as possibilities, they happened, happen and will always happen. There's no changing it, you can view what is, and view alternate histories. But there's no changing the death of Yoda or Harry Potter's parents, those are things that are part of one potential sequence of events. The sequences exist independent of time.

Even with godhood, you can't stop logical possibilities from existing and always being, you can only view such, experience such.

Even simple substraction or addition with branching offers universal computation, a very simple process. There is nothing wrong morally with substracting, or adding, nor with making a decision as to where to add or substract. When you draw a painting of an elephant, that elephant exists independent of the painting, the painting is not unethical. Similar reality as is appears to be an instance of the possibilities, and the elephant exists independent of its presence in any one planet.
So yes I would run simulations, but the consciousness while referent to the structures generated, exists, existed, and will exist independent of any particular instantiation.

You can't stop sequences of events from happening, you can access such, and even access alternate ones where divine intervention occurs, but all possibilities have already taken root, they simply are, forever so. -source link for thread on kurzweilai

Cool fictional superpower

Reality Warping-link to related article

By manipulation of the mind's eye all sensation becomes possible at one's finger tips.   Some works of man suggest that man's extent with this will rest atop the layer of the real world.   Whether the underlying layer of the material world can be breached allowing for, perhaps with a machine, to manipulate causality and reality itself, is a good question.   It is the hypothetical final class of weaponry or technology.   If it can be accomplished, the master algorithm should be able to find it, perhaps in short order.

Are we bound by an underlying set of rules or laws that are unchanging?  Or can the underlying rules themselves be subjected to change?

Bank of America Analysts Say There's A 50% Chance We Live In The Matrix

Bank of America analysts have suggested that there is a 20 to 50 percent chance that the world around us is a "Matrix-style virtual reality." The report stated, "It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilizations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors." The idea is certainly nothing new, as many influential visionaries have come to similar theories. What some may find most unusual about the report is who issued it. According to Business Insider, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America's wealth management company, sent out a briefing to investors outlining their Matrix theory.-source slashdot

Thankfully there are more matrix movies coming, or so I've heard.

Comment on simulation hypothesis and godlike entities at kurzweilai

Thing is, universal computation emerges from systems implementing extremely simple rules. Equally simple starting state allows such a system to generate all possible programs and simulatable universes. Effectively everything can emerge from extremely simple initial state.

What's to say that general intelligence requires extremely complex end products of millions years of natural selection? It's pretty easy to conceive that general intelligence may emerge from extremely simple set of rules even on simple initial state. If so a godlike entity could easily emerge. This is also ignoring ideas like boltzmann brains which suggest that highly complex objects can actually emerge out of the vacuum fully formed given infinite time and space.

While on the subject of boltzmann brains, it is conceivable that a boltzmann simulation computer could pop out of the vacuum with countless virtual inhabitants or brains in vats if brains have special uncomputable properties.

That said, as a determinist, I believe there is no free will, and all that can be is simply to experience sensations including the sensation of will. Even a being in a godlike state may not actually be able to influence anything. Changing the computations you're performing, may be like changing dvds in a dvd player, you change the movie being played but the characters and events remain unchanged in each individual movie.

A pattern can exist in an infinite number of places, I just don't see how writing down a pattern in a piece of paper or in computer memory, how that changes in any way the pattern or sequence of patterns. Any instance of the pattern seems to be fundamentally changeless and atemporal, independent of any physical copies and changes made to said copies.

That;s the thing with simulations, at least digital simulation rest on patterns. The same exact simulation is probably running in an infinity of places, even if one copy shuts down, it doesn't affect the actual sequence of events. Like a dvd of say terminator 2 being burnt, that doesn't actually destroy the actual characters or story.

What happens if you take a simulation down an unlikely set of paths, say godlike interactions, well that always existed as a possibility. Like the concept of alternate timelines, where the time changes were always there, these interactions were always part of that particular path, and are probably occurring in an infinite number of places. It's like fanfiction of a particular work, it is a possible trajectory.

If digital physics is true, if we've also got determinism and patterns are essentially changeless and atemporal in nature. Then there can be no morality if such is the case, doing something in the real world would be no different from doing it in a virtual world, not only that but there would be no choice just the illusion of choice. And in the end, writing numbers or patterns down, simulating an experience in a computer, would be no different than an interactive movie, all that could be is was and will always be. No matter the actions taken within a digital simulation there would fundamentally not be anything wrong with them, as it'd be simply a transition between pre-existent atemporal patterns not the actual creation of patterns(branching and adding).- source thread