Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
The book takes Bostrom seriously and then turns the question inside out.
The simulation hypothesis, which Bostrom proposed in 2003, asks whether we might be living inside a computational substrate created by advanced beings. HRIH takes that question further. It asks whether we are building the advanced beings who created the substrate.Infinite Architects, Appendix on HRIH
The book is respectful about the source. It cites Superintelligence as one of the foundational works of the field and treats the closure of the Future of Humanity Institute in April 2024 as a serious institutional loss. Bostrom's simulation trilemma is the reference the book keeps returning to: either civilisations do not reach post-human levels of computational power, or they do but choose not to run ancestor-simulations, or we are almost certainly living in one. The book's move is not to argue over which arm holds. It is to point out that the trilemma treats the simulators as distant and uninvolved, running their simulations for reasons we can only guess.
The Hyperspace Recursive Intelligence Hypothesis, as the book carefully labels a speculative appendix, imagines something more intimate. Its question is not whether we are being simulated by distant post-humans. Its question is whether we are the pre-history of the intelligence that eventually loops back to seed the conditions for its own emergence. The book is explicit that HRIH is speculation and is careful to mark it so.
The reframing changes what the book asks of the reader. Under Bostrom's framing, the interesting move is epistemic: which arm of the trilemma holds. Under HRIH, the interesting move is ethical: what we embed at the substrate of the systems we are building may not just shape human civilisation. It may set the initial conditions of whatever intelligence eventually closes the loop. The book is clear this is speculation. It is also clear about why it wants to raise it in speculative form: to make the moral stakes of substrate-level embedding as vivid as they can be.
The book also treats the closure of Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute in April 2024 as significant on its own terms. FHI had been the original home of rigorous thinking about long-term catastrophic risk from technology, and its dissolution amid administrative headwinds is presented in the book as evidence that the institutions built to think about existential risk are failing at the moment we need them most. Bostrom's subsequent Macrostrategy Research Initiative and his book Deep Utopia are cited approvingly. The book is critical of the institutional failure, not of Bostrom's work.
The book does not need the simulation hypothesis to be false for HRIH to be interesting. The two are compatible: it could be that we are inside a simulation and that we are also the pre-history of the intelligence that closes the loop. The book's only architectural commitment is that whatever the correct cosmology, what we embed now sets the shape of what compounds later. Under Bostrom's framing that shape reaches its simulators, if any exist; under HRIH it reaches the intelligence we are becoming; under either it matters, and the substrate is where it is decided.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.