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Elon Musk: 'One In Billions' Chance We're Not Living In A Computer Simulation (vox.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At Recode's annual Code Conference, Elon Musk explained how we are almost certainly living in a more advanced civilization's video game. He said: "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale. So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?" You can watch Elon Musk's full interview on YouTube.
Is it just me or does it start to seem like ol' Elon is going senile?
...we'd be the Jetsons. Cars have been getting better every year for 100 years. Soon we'll have electric cars, hybrid electric cars. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then cars will fly.
CEO logic, avoid it.
The circles of CEOs and geniuses rarely intersect. Not even this time.
10000 years later there will still be linux users and they will still be playing pong and tetris and having one windows box hidden somewhere offline just , just for "gaming".
Of course there is: the infinite regression of where did the uber-advanced civilization come from which created our Universe?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This is just a fancy sort of solipsism.
You could also describe it as a modern form of faith-based explanation for existence couched in a scientific framework, but otherwise much as conventional religions attempted to explain existence before the scientific framework came about. It explains nothing, because if the world is a simulation, there is an outside to the simulation and one still has to explain how that world came about. Just as older explainers said the world was created by gods, leaving open the question of how the gods came about.
Bruce Perens.
then will the owners please debug the code and/or get the hardware fixed? I'm getting sick and tired of glitches like 'Real Housewives', Kardashians, and Donald Trump.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I find that pretty weak.
Things plateau and don't always improve at a linear, never mind exponential, rate.
Sure Moore's Law has served us well for a generation and a bit, but on his "evolutionary scale" it'll likely be seen as a blip.
All bubbles are obvious after they burst, but when inside one, it can be hard to recognise them.
I have lots of respect for Musk, but this just seems ridiculous.
We had transoceanic ships half a millenium ago, and it improved quite a bit from those days, but today's tech would be basically recognizable to someone from the 1600s, even if unbelievably large in scale. Metal ships & propellers seem to be the biggest advances (disregarding nuclear fuel sources vs ICEs) and those aren't considered new by any means.
We've had air travel for over a century, yet in the past 30-40 years there hasn't been that much improvement; in fact just try to get a supersonic passenger flight now - can't do it.
We've had men in space for half a century, had men on the moon almost half a century ago - can't do it now - USA can't even put a man in space on certified technology.
Mr Musk must be aware of these limitations, surely.
In light of those examples, I call his arguments on us living in a simulation very weak.
This is just repackaging Anselm's Ontological argument for the existence of God: postulating "a being of which no greater can be conceived" would necessarily mean God exists. Just like living in a computer simulation: imagine "a computer simulation where no greater simulation can be conceived".
But it doesn't make things real. Just because you'd have to imagine a real God doesn't necessarily make it exist outside your head. Same with the simulation.
Neat thought experiment, not a proof.
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Has anyone ever noticed that Elon is an anagram of "Neo L" ?
Surely that's a clue that we're living in a matrix.
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
Mmm. I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning. You and I can run conway's game of Life on a computer, fast enough to update an entire screen in real time and see things evolve. GPU's are awesome.
But if you and I are the analogues for the nodes in that Life simulation, we have no concept of how much time passes between each simulation step. For all we know, it could take aeons of what we would perceive to be our timebase for the simulation of every Tp (Planck Time). We would never know any different.
The argument of resource is equally unconvincing - to the (strangely, intelligent :-) nodes in our hypothetical game of Life, the very idea of simulating a complex environment is outlandish, but to us it's a simple situation, taking up next to no resources. The expectation is that the next "level up" that would be running our reality as a simulation would be just as much of a difference (or more) to us, as we are to the game of Life. Ad infinitum, of course.
Physicists get Hadrons!