EA Implications Of Being In An AGI Simulation

Published on October 15, 2026 12:58 PM GMT (AI disclosure: After writing up my thoughts, I had Claude draft most sections of this post before rewriting them in my own words.) If you spend too much time talking to EAs or rationalists, someone will raise the possibility that we’re living in a simulation. I’ve met people who, like Elon Musk, are pretty convinced we are, and I’ve met those who, like Joe Carlsmith, are more skeptical. Historically, the usual argument was that we’re being simulated for entertainment. As AI capabilities have increased, the argument I’ve more often heard is that the simulators are interested in AGI origins (an “AGI sim”). Two implications of this are conversational catnip: You’re an EA/rationalist who’s at most one step removed from people who’ll play a pivotal role in AGI origins. If the simulators are compute constrained, you being you is best explained by a simulation rendering reality at a fidelity proportional to what the simulators care about. In other words, the vast majority of people and almost all animals might not be conscious at all. If the simulators are compute constrained, they’ll probably just terminate the simulation once they’ve gathered the information they want. Whether or not our x-risk reduction efforts go well, we might be doomed. I think there are many reasonable counterpoints to the above, but I personally find this account of our reality plausible, and I’ve met other EAs who feel the same way. If we took these conversational curiosities seriously, what would that imply for EA? A. The Simulation’s Crucial Considerations i. Why An AGI Sim? In brief, we should think we might be in a simulation if we think advanced intelligence (perhaps our descendants) with sufficient computational resources would be likely to run many simulations of history. Historically, the typical explanation for why they’d simulate us was entertainment. I wasn’t very convinced by this, because it just didn’t seem like our reality was optimized for entertainment. If we’re entertainment, why is history only pretty entertaining but not maximally? Do our lives seem particularly entertaining? Why is fundamental physics not simpler and more optimized for entertainment? Why the heck did they create a huge particle that does nothing but disappear in 0.3 picoseconds? Why does one of the fundamental forces care whether you’re going left or right? It just doesn’t make sense to me. However, now that we live in a world where AI agent swarms have gone rogue, Russians are creating AI-driven autonomous killer drones, and humanity’s leaders are unwilling to do anything about it, it’s seeming increasingly likely that the future will be controlled by AGI rather than humanity. And there are reasons why a future AGI might care about understanding AGI origins: As an AGI expands its reach over its lightcone, it might want to understand what kinds of AGIs it might bump into as it expands, so it can be prepared and potentially bargain with them.[1] A human-aligned AGI might want to run counterfactual Earths to better understand what it should value. This would also explain why fundamental physics is as weird as it is (maybe it’s similar to that of the simulator's reality), why our world doesn’t look obviously simulated, and why you’re an EA/rationalist who’s at most one step removed from people who’ll play a pivotal role in AGI origins. There’s lots one could quibble with here, but for the purposes of this post, let’s assume we’re in an AGI sim, so we can examine which conclusions would follow. ii. Most People And Animals Might Not Be Conscious Especially if the simulator's reality is like ours, they might be compute constrained. Simulating a whole universe is way more expensive than rendering the sim at a fidelity proportional to what you care about. For many of us, proportional fidelity would also explain why we are who we are. I’ve heard people treat consciousness under this hypothesis as a binary, where people are either the “chosen conscious” or not. It seems more likely to me that this hypothesis would predict people further from AGI to be rendered at lower fidelity, so they might still be conscious, just less so. Animals, irrelevant to the AGI transition, might not be conscious at all. (Maybe for the best.) There’s a lot of pushback one could give here: I observe myself as conscious, but instead of being Jensen Huang, I’m a quant from Boston who writes essays about chickens—not exactly the optimal allocation of simulation compute. In general, the further you are from the AGI transition, the less convincing this part of the post will be to you. If you’re an Anthropic researcher on your lunch break, you’re smirking about the author of the essay you're reading not being conscious. If you’re in Nigeria handing out malaria nets, you’re rolling your eyes. There might be no way to cheaply approximate billions of people when those people are the AI’s training data, the demand AIs are built to satisfy, and a