Category Archives: Simulation

Aug 28

Some thoughts on Software Patents

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I have read a lot of what I consider to be fairly convincing arguments relating to software patents and whether the courts should “allow them” or “ban them”. Before I had the insight I’m going to share below I was definitely a fence hopper, but I think I have finally satisfied myself with an answer. It takes a wee bit of imagination and a willingness to be somewhat philosophical to get there, but I think the thought process will get you there.

 

If you’ve seen “The Matrix” you know that almost the entire movie involves real people living and acting in a virtual world. If you’ve seen “The Matrix Reloaded” you’ll remember a scene where a ship is returning to realworld city of Zion and they are getting ready to enter the gates to the city. The city is very mechanical and computers are utilized to control everything, but do the people of Zion who operate the computers sit behind a keyboard? No they don’t. Instead they “plug in” in the real world transferring they minds into the virtual world in which someone (presumably other humans) has programmed all of these controls. The controls cool thing about these controls is that not only can they be laid out like a keyboard, but they can also be like a lever. It’s their own virtual world so they can build it however they want. They just need to be presented with an environment that they can manipulate to get “the job” done.

 

Now imagine current earth humans being able to allow their mind to live or work inside of a virtual world. Everything in that virtual world is actually software! Nothing is physical though it could be designed to look it and feel it. It may be designed such that your physical actions (ie grabbing a lever and pulling / pushing it) causethe software to behave in different ways, but it’s still not actually physical. How you interact with that software simply causes some state change in the outside world, but what you are interacting with IS software. Yes, the changes you introduce by manipulating the controls made available to you will cause some other software to cause changes in the outside world which will in turn cause a change to the view of the world presented to the those in the virtual world (and in the physical world). But it’s still software making it all work. The tools are software. The connections are software. The actor could even be software.

 

Once these types of systems are possible, and especially once they are common place, there could be a rush of what, in the physical world of today, we would call innovative people coming up with new widgets that can be used inside of this virtual world. These innovations will almost surely come with a price that would be paid by the programmer. In that case there would be a need for protection under some type of law in order to encourage people to create, test, and perfect them. Do we have a system that provides this sort of protection today? Yes, we do, and it is the patent system. It would also be applicable to this sort of situation considering the new types of “tools” that people would “physically” interact with inside the virtual world. All manner of things are possible in the real world today that we just knew wasn’t possible before (until someone innovated a way to do it), and the same will be true in the virtual world. Ways of doing things never even thought of will be, given the right motivation, not only thought of but implemented and improved upon. Different ways of looking at problems will cause unique solutions to become apparent. The solutions would be “obvious” once pointed out, but would be nonobvious prior. Why would someone dedicate their time to looking for alternate solutions if the answer will net them no reward? History shows us that they won’t… not to the same degree anyway.

 

Q: What about a hammer vs a “virtual hammer”? Would you really allow a patent on a virtual hammer that does the same thing in software world that it does in the real world? That seems like everything would get repatented with the only difference being that it is “in software”.

 

A: This question stems from one of the common errors untrained people make when judging patent validity. You can’t just look at the title, or the summary. Think about it. A software hammer wouldn’t be the same thing as a hardware hammer would it? Software doesn’t have physical nails to drive. But maybe a software hammer can be made such that it easy automates the binding of two or more components using a single connective module. Something that used to take 10 virtual actions can be easily rolled  up into the action of hitting the objects with a hammer. The hammer basically just does all of those steps that “physically” had to be done before and elminates them through some ingenious “piece of code”. Testing this peice of code and finding just the right tweaks for it came with a cost of thousands of lost operations (cpu cycles), mangled data, and even memory leaks that had to be dealt with before it became stable to be used in the virtual world. Why would someone give up these precious resources if it would not gain them some advantage? Now that it is done it is a easily copyable solution so what’s to stop another from copying it and using it without having put their own butts on the line? Copyright doesn’t do the trick as code can be rewritten (hell, translate it to another language and you’ll have to modify it to do so). You’re still using the same algorithm, but it obviously not the same code. Yes it is and you shouldn’t be allowed to steal the code, change the language, and call it new.

 

It is my belief that as things become more virtualized and as virtual reality starts to become both more real and more immersive that we will see more need for patents on things in the virtual world. These things are no doubt software. But they are also no doubt in need of protection.

 

To be continued… or is this one step too far?

 

And if we know that software should be patentable in the case of said eventual world, then software should be patentable now due to the simple fact that the simulation argument leads there.

 

Jan 24

Are you living in a computer simulation?

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This is a portion of a much longer document not written by me, but by NICK BOSTROM. Please visit his site by using the links he provided in the original work.


ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

 

BY
NICK BOSTROM

Department
of Philosophy, Oxford University

 

Homepage:
http://www.nickbostrom.com

[First
version: May, 2001; Final version July 2002]

Published in Philosophical Quarterly
(2003), Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255.

[This
document is located at http://www.simulation-argument.com] [pdf-version] [mirrored by PoolOfThought pdf-version]

 

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true:
(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations
is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

 

I.
INTRODUCTION

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea. The rest of this paper will spell it out more carefully.

Apart from the interest this thesis may hold for those who are engaged in futuristic speculation, there are also more purely theoretical rewards. The argument provides a stimulus for formulating some methodological and metaphysical questions, and it suggests naturalistic analogies to certain traditional religious conceptions, which
some may find amusing or thought-provoking.

The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we formulate an assumption that we need to import from the philosophy of mind in order to get the argument started. Second, we consider some empirical reasons for thinking that running vastly many simulations of human minds would be within the capability of a future civilization that has developed many of those technologies that can already be shown to be compatible with known physical laws and engineering constraints. This part is not philosophically necessary but it provides an incentive for paying attention to the rest. Then follows the core of the argument, which makes use of some simple probability theory, and a section providing support for a weak indifference principle that the argument employs. Lastly, we discuss some interpretations of the disjunction, mentioned in the abstract, that forms the conclusion of the simulation argument.