Recreating the past with FIVR?

[Jimmy Karwood]

Recently I was watching Oliver Stone's latest JFK documentary and I wondered if this thought exercise could be plausible. With all the parameters could you perfectly recreate history from the beginning? Then all of those cold case mysteries would be unveiled. No need for museums if history is at the palm of your hands and so forth.

[Cyber_Rebel]

Well, that idea sounds like the basis for the Simulation Theory. The very reason for conducting such a simulation being to experience or study natural conditions as they unfold. Perhaps historians or curators of the future will be VR denizens attempting to recreate accurate historical experiences. Detectives immersing themselves to solve old historical cases reminds me of Data/Picard from TNG attempting that in the Holodeck.

[Tadasuke]

I am sure that we or AI could come up with something much, much better, more interesting, more fun than the past. Using FIVR to simulate the past is one of the more boring and uninspired options you can choose.

[Vakanai]

Recently I was watching Oliver Stone's latest JFK documentary and I wondered if this thought exercise could be plausible. With all the parameters could you perfectly recreate history from the beginning? Then all of those cold case mysteries would be unveiled. No need for museums if history is at the palm of your hands and so forth.

The bold is the problem. We can never successfully recreate the past, even future super AI can never recreate the past, because too many parameters are simply unknown and unknowable. We can at best make a "probable" simulation given the vast troves of data about that day recorded, but it's only a probability given known data. We can never truthfully recreate the past as it was, no AI will ever have access to that much data. And the further back you go the less available data the more uncertain the simulation will become.

We like to imagine future AI as God-like, and in many ways it will be. But it's never going to reach true omniscience, that's just physics. There are going to be limitations. There's just so much that can be extrapolated with the data that can be accessed. But yes, in the future AI simulations will be run to come up with the most likely probabilities. For example I never see people being sentenced solely based on a probability given by a simulation, but I see such probabilities being used by law enforcement in the future to direct their investigative efforts. That's a future that is coming, and poses some perhaps Orwellian issues society should discuss before it get there.