Are We Living in a Simulation?
In the 1990s, futurist and AI researcher Hans Moravec suggested that our Universe might be a simulation.
Assuming the artificial intelligences now have truly overwhelming processing power, they should be able to reconstruct human society in every detail by tracing atomic events backward in time. “It will cost them very little to preserve us this way,” he points out. “They will, in fact, be able to re-create a model of our entire civilization, with everything and everyone in it, down to the atomic level, simulating our atoms with machinery that’s vastly subatomic. Also,” he says with amusement, “they’ll be able to use data compression to remove the redundant stuff that isn’t important.”
But by this logic, our current “reality” could be nothing more than a simulation produced by information entities.
“Of course.” Moravec shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious. “In fact, the robots will re-create us any number of times, whereas the original version of our world exists, at most, only once. Therefore, statistically speaking, it’s much more likely we’re living in a vast simulation than in the original version. To me, the whole concept of reality is rather absurd. But while you’re inside the scenario, you can’t help but play by the rules. So we might as well pretend this is real - even though the chance things are as they seem is essentially negligible.”
And so, according to Hans Moravec, the human race is almost certainly extinct, while the world around us is just an advanced version of SimCity.
In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom examined the matter more closely:
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.
In the above (as well as in this follow-up video by Vsauce 3), Kurzgesagt explores these ideas and their implications. Here’s the one that always gets me: If simulations are possible, there are probably a lot of them, which means the chances that we’re inside one of them is high. Like, if there’s one real Universe and 17 quadrillion simulated universes, you’re almost certainly in one of the simulations.
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