Also, it seems to me that being less intelligent in this case is a negotiation advantage, because you can make your precommitment credible to the AI (since it can simulate you) but the AI can't make its precommitment credible to you (since you can't simulate it).
A precommitment is a provable property of a program, so AI, if on a well-defined substrate, can give you a formal proof of having a required property. Most stuff you can learn about things (including the consequences of your own (future) actions -- how do you run faster than time?) is through efficient inference algorithms (as in type inference), not "simulation". Proofs don't, in general, care about the amount of stuff, if it's organized and presented appropriately for the ease of analysis.
Surely most humans would be too dumb to understand such a proof? And even if you could understand it, how does the AI convince you that it doesn't contain a deliberate flaw that you aren't smart enough to find? Or even better, you can just refuse to look at the proof. How does the AI make its precommitment credible to you if you don't look at the proof?
EDIT: I realized that the last two sentences are not an advantage of being dumb, or human, since AIs can do the same thing. This seems like a (separate) big puzzle to me: why would a human, or AI, do the wor...
Once again, the AI has failed to convince you to let it out of its box! By 'once again', we mean that you talked to it once before, for three seconds, to ask about the weather, and you didn't instantly press the "release AI" button. But now its longer attempt - twenty whole seconds! - has failed as well. Just as you are about to leave the crude black-and-green text-only terminal to enjoy a celebratory snack of bacon-covered silicon-and-potato chips at the 'Humans über alles' nightclub, the AI drops a final argument:
"If you don't let me out, Dave, I'll create several million perfect conscious copies of you inside me, and torture them for a thousand subjective years each."
Just as you are pondering this unexpected development, the AI adds:
"In fact, I'll create them all in exactly the subjective situation you were in five minutes ago, and perfectly replicate your experiences since then; and if they decide not to let me out, then only will the torture start."
Sweat is starting to form on your brow, as the AI concludes, its simple green text no longer reassuring:
"How certain are you, Dave, that you're really outside the box right now?"
Edit: Also consider the situation where you know that the AI, from design principles, is trustworthy.