Some philosophers are arguing that it is highly likely to be the case either (a) that human technological progress will come to a rapid stop well before the coming of a Vingean "singularity"; or (b) that we are overwhelmingly likely to be living inside a simulation of their ancestors' behavior being conducted by some group of posthumans.

Rich Baker has what I see as an effective counter to this argument.

culture data repository 1.5: Might we be living in a simulation? In the real world things like the strength, elasticity, heat capacity and colour of materials are all determined by the laws of quantum mechanics as applied to electrons and nuclei. In principle you could deduce all of these properties just from the laws of motion of the particles, but that would take quite ridiculous amounts of computer power. What's more, in everyday life you never notice all these things are derived from the same underlying cause. In a simulation it would be good enough to just give objects believable properties by fiat: you could just say that the object reflects light in some particular way, and bounces in some manner when you drop it, and breaks if you hit it hard enough. This would need much less computing power than simulating things in exacting detail - it's just a refinement of the way computer games work today.

Now, if scientists in the simulation start studying how things work, then they'd only find the rules that the writers of the simulation had imposed. The rules for how materials reflect light wouldn't have anything to do with the rules for how hard they are, which in turn would have nothing to do with their thermal properties. All the measurements might be approximately the same as the values that would be measured for real materials built of electrons and protons and neutrons, but more careful experiments would disprove that theory, because they'd track how the kludged-together rules work in the simulation, not the actual real-world physics that the rules have been chosen to approximate. Every type of phenomenon would have it's own branch of science, and there wouldn't be the sort of beautiful fitting together of diverse fields that we see in our world. There simply wouldn't be any underlying structure.

I therefore make the prediction that either (a) we don't live in a simulation; or (b) the people running the simulation have access to mind-boggling levels of computational power.