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TimS comments on Wanted: "The AIs will need humans" arguments - Less Wrong
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I don't understand why you think "preserve history, run historical simulations, and study AI's origins" implies that the AI will preserve actual living humans for any significant amount of time. One generation (practically the blink of an eye compared to plausible AI lifetimes) seems like it would produce more than enough data.
Given enough computation the best way to generate accurate generative probabilistic models is to run lots of detailed Monte Carlo simulations. AIXI like models do this, human brains do it to a limited extent.
What does that have to do with whether an AI will need living human beings? It seems like there is an unstated premise that living humans are equivalent to simulated humans. That's a defensible position, but implicitly asserting the position is not equivalent to defending it.
The AI will need to simulate its history as a natural necessary component of its 'thinking'. For a powerful enough AI, this will entail simulation down to the level of say the Matrix, where individual computers and human minds are simulated at their natural computational scale level.
Yes. I'm assuming most people here are sufficiently familiar with this position such that it doesn't require my defense in a comment like this.
My estimate is more on the "billions of years" timescale. What aliens one might meet is important, potentially life-threatening information, and humans are a big, important and deep clue about the topic that would be difficult to exhaust.
Being inexhaustible, even if true, is not enough. Keeping humans around (or simulated) would have to be a better use of resources (marginally) than anything else the AGI could think of. That's a strong claim; why do you think that?
Also, if AIs replace humans in the course of history, then arguably studying other AIs would be an even bigger clue to possible aliens. And AIs can be much more diverse than humans, so there would be more to study.
History is valuable, and irreplaceable if lost. Possibly a long sequence of wars early on might destroy it before it could be properly backed up - but the chances of such a loss seem low. Human history seems particularly significant when considering the forms of possible aliens. But, I could be wrong about some of this. I'm not overwhelmingly confident of this line of reasoning - though I am prettty sure that many others are neglecting it without having good reasons for doing so.
Why is human history so important, or useful, in predicting aliens? Why would it be better than:
Human history's importance gets diluted once advanced aliens are encountered - though the chances of any such encounter soon seem slender - for various reasons. Primitive aliens would still be very interesting.
Experiments that create living humans are mostly "fine by me".
They'll (probably) preserve a whole chunk of our ecosystem - for the reasons you mention, though only analysing non-human life (or post human life) skips out some of the most interesting bits of their own origin story, which they (like us) are likely to be particularly interested in.
After a while, aliens are likely to be our descendants' biggest threat. They probably won't throw away vital clues relating to the issue casually.