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Bank of America Analysts Say There's A 50% Chance We Live In The Matrix (independent.co.uk)
Bank of America analysts have suggested that there is a 20 to 50 percent chance that the world around us is a "Matrix-style virtual reality." The report stated, "It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilizations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors." The idea is certainly nothing new, as many influential visionaries have come to similar theories. What some may find most unusual about the report is who issued it. According to Business Insider, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America's wealth management company, sent out a briefing to investors outlining their Matrix theory. In response, Slashdot reader marmot7 writes: Personally, I'd like to see all that brain power go toward a better and more stable banking system, not toward the promoting the nihilistic and self-indulgent idea that this might be the Matrix. Don't worry that banks behave in ways that create instability, it's not real. Just relax and enjoy the ones and zeroes. I have no doubt there are good, well meaning people there. I just don't really need my bank weighing in on the mystery of reality any more than I need them to come up with a unified theory of physics at long last. Well, unless it's in their spare time then by all means.
My impression is that banks are about the bottom line and profits. Why is someone at a bank doing that research?
At least, now you know where you should NOT put your money.
What narrow thinking in these comments. I know, "get off my lawn, Slashdot used to be amazing!" has been said before, but all of these comments are simple "LULZ BofA is stoopid!" Come on people, think bigger and more cynically! Why not devote a few analyst cycles to ponder the reality vs simulation question if you're a major finance company? If we are in a simulation, isn't there a healthy chance that simulation includes bugs that could be exploited by economists living within it?
How many billions could you make if you were able to predict glitches in the Matrix?
The better I understand quantum mechanics, the more likely I think this is.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'd love to know what they base it on. The typical argument is that, at a given point in its maturity, any technological civilisation will be able to produce simulations that are sufficiently real that the inhabitants can't tell that they are inside a simulation. At this point, they will do so at least once and there will be more simulated realities than real ones. Some of these simulations will be complex enough for recursive simulation, and so the number will grow. If we assume that the base reality is at least as big as ours appears to be, and has been around for as long as hours appears to have been, then there must be a great many technological civilisations (even if you assume an average of only one per galaxy, it's a huge number) that have reached the point of being able to build simulations. As such, the number of beings inside simulated realities vastly exceeds the number in the base reality and so there is a far greater probability that you are in a simulation (and probably in a recursive simulation) than that you are in the base reality.
A similar argument states that this probability is further increased because we can't yet build realistic simulations and you could significantly reduce the computational requirements of your simulation by not making its inhabitants sufficiently technologically advanced to require recursive simulation.
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