Compute is physically simpler than life. Where there is life, there is necessarily also compute. Where there is compute, there isn't necessarily also life.

Good, and cheap, is the thing. If we didn't have silicon computing, we would still have vacuum tubes, we'd still have computers. But as I understand it, vacuum tubes sucked, so I wouldn't expect that that machine learning would be moving so quickly at this point.

If that were the case, there'd be more measure in the next year than in the next second, but you don't suddenly find yourself a year from now. (right?)

I think you're imagining the decay running in the wrong direction. I suppose you could define it that way. It seems less natural.

But you can ask a similar question... should I expect to 'find myself in the previous year' in some sense. Well I could. If there were some "I" hopping between every observer-moment in existence (this is a fairly common form of super-utilitarianism), it wouldn't be perceptible, I wouldn't remember ever having been elsewhere, our memories are all just properties of whatever vessel we currently occupy.

I'd phrase it more as... if you observe that you're a human, there's a prior on finding that you're in the earliest year (or the earliest cosmological reproductive cycle) in which a lot of humans exist. You could be in a later year, but until you can confirm that with evidence, you consider it less likely.

But that has to trade off against the fact that the number of universes (and so the number of humans) keeps ballooning over time (or even outside of time), and I don't really know how to navigate that, could be that you should expect to be in the latest possible universe, because the measure increases from branching outweigh the measure losses from time discounting.