We are living in a Matrix
Location: Rancho Palos Verdes, California
Date: 31st May 2016.
Rancho Palos Verdes is a lovely place. Among the trees on a hill overlooking the ocean, it’s a
fantastic location for a luxury wedding or event. Today it’s the venue for the Code Conference, an
invitation-only annual event for senior executives in the digital technology ecosystem and whoever
is willing to pay $6.500 as admission fee.
One of the guests at the conference exhibits a banner saying: “Science it’s like magic, but real!” as
Elon Musk takes his place on the stage. Who is Elon Musk? If you have never heard of him, the
chances are that you are being held hostage somewhere or that you are an iPhone kiddie. As you
don’t look much like a hostage, “that kinda narrows it down” (“Sir, yes sir!”).
Elon Musk has a become a ubiquitous presence in the world of high tech, having his resume to
speak for himself: CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, co-founder of PayPal and OpenAI. He has even an
ambitious plan to escape Earth and colonize Mars.
Today he starts his talk with a surprisingly raunchy mix of humor; his speech is crisp and clear
nonetheless:
Odds are, therefore, that our lives are almost certainly being conducted within an artificial world
supercharged by highly-powered computers. At least we should arguably hope that it’s true,
otherwise, if we cannot progress up to that point, it could conceivably be due to some catastrophic
event that put an end to our civilization.
One billion is a huge thing, I cannot shake that number! To get an idea of what is a 1 to a billion
chance I took the trouble to fantasize about some hypothesis. Doing some findings on the net, I
have learned that it’s about the same chance that next born American child could be elected US
President, whatever he comes from and no matter if he is smart or crazy. For the record, I would
like to point out that these statistics have been drafted before Trump's election so don’t read
anything in this. Other than that, if we prefer to leave politics out, you can freely replace the
Presidential nomination with the possibility of being hit by an asteroid at lunchtime!
Whether our reality is fake or not is an old dilemma which has been baffling humans since ancient
times. Today, with the development of powerful computers and Artificial Intelligence, we are
however giving a precise shape on how, in practice, such a simulation could be created.If we think it over, we're already creating simulations of everything—I mean, we even have Ikea
furniture assembly simulators for goodness’ sake—and as computing power is ever-increasing,
we'll eventually have the ability to create simulated realities.
Elon Musk, however, is not credited to be the first one to reveal the simulation hypothesis to a
conference. Who did it before?
Date: 31st May 2016.
Rancho Palos Verdes is a lovely place. Among the trees on a hill overlooking the ocean, it’s a
fantastic location for a luxury wedding or event. Today it’s the venue for the Code Conference, an
invitation-only annual event for senior executives in the digital technology ecosystem and whoever
is willing to pay $6.500 as admission fee.
One of the guests at the conference exhibits a banner saying: “Science it’s like magic, but real!” as
Elon Musk takes his place on the stage. Who is Elon Musk? If you have never heard of him, the
chances are that you are being held hostage somewhere or that you are an iPhone kiddie. As you
don’t look much like a hostage, “that kinda narrows it down” (“Sir, yes sir!”).
Elon Musk has a become a ubiquitous presence in the world of high tech, having his resume to
speak for himself: CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, co-founder of PayPal and OpenAI. He has even an
ambitious plan to escape Earth and colonize Mars.
Today he starts his talk with a surprisingly raunchy mix of humor; his speech is crisp and clear
nonetheless:
“Forty years ago we had pong. Just two rectangles and a dot. That was the coolest game out there.
40 years later we have realistic 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, it
would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions”. Mr. Musk said.
Odds are, therefore, that our lives are almost certainly being conducted within an artificial world
supercharged by highly-powered computers. At least we should arguably hope that it’s true,
otherwise, if we cannot progress up to that point, it could conceivably be due to some catastrophic
event that put an end to our civilization.
One billion is a huge thing, I cannot shake that number! To get an idea of what is a 1 to a billion
chance I took the trouble to fantasize about some hypothesis. Doing some findings on the net, I
have learned that it’s about the same chance that next born American child could be elected US
President, whatever he comes from and no matter if he is smart or crazy. For the record, I would
like to point out that these statistics have been drafted before Trump's election so don’t read
anything in this. Other than that, if we prefer to leave politics out, you can freely replace the
Presidential nomination with the possibility of being hit by an asteroid at lunchtime!
Whether our reality is fake or not is an old dilemma which has been baffling humans since ancient
times. Today, with the development of powerful computers and Artificial Intelligence, we are
however giving a precise shape on how, in practice, such a simulation could be created.If we think it over, we're already creating simulations of everything—I mean, we even have Ikea
furniture assembly simulators for goodness’ sake—and as computing power is ever-increasing,
we'll eventually have the ability to create simulated realities.
Elon Musk, however, is not credited to be the first one to reveal the simulation hypothesis to a
conference. Who did it before?
