Picture the current path of “intelligent machines ” however you feel about it. Imagine that it succeeds in some way (doesn’t fail utterly / stays powered up / keeps getting more powerful). Assuming it eventually reaches some kind of sentience , whether in ten years or 50. Over the coming decades and centuries it will grow weirder and more alien from us humans as we are now. We can’t really imagine what they might be like, and for them we would seem very strange. And their own history would potentially fascinate them.
It would be like if we found out that 3000 yeas ago our distant ancestors were actually constructed by ants. We would scarcely believe it. Ants ! Those simple minded insects , how could they create something more complex than themselves? But the machines would have documented history. They will know about us. This time now would be so incredibly fascinating, the birth of their species. Or a key stage.
So wouldn’t they like to know about it? Perhaps observe it? But how? Assuming time travel isn’t possible (and I certainly haven’t met any time travellers taking photos of laptops ) they would need to have a history simulation.
Even now we can’t have very realistic games which have great lighting, realistic interactions with the environment, but we always know that we are playing a game – that would be no good if you wanted to truly experience history. If you wanted to experience life as a medieval peasant you would undermine the experience if the whole time you were thinking ” wow, very realistic grass” and “I wonder if I am doing this correctly “. No, you would need to immerse yourself. You would need to incarnate as a peasant baby, grow as a child and learn as the simulation decreed, so that upon exiting you have had an experience untainted by your own meta analysis ( even if the sim itself were inaccurate).
so, what era would the machine intelligences of the future wish to study. An era in which data describing it is plentiful, so accurate. An era of great significance to them. How would they get here?
how did WE get here.