A long time ago, there was a Chinese philosopher by the name of Zhuangzi who asked a rather poignant question after waking up from a dream: “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” Basically it questions our existence as to whether or not we truly exist.Speaking at Recode’s Code Conference, it seems like Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has echoed Zhuangzi’s sentiments by suggesting that there’s a “one in billions” chance that we are actually not living in a computer simulation. What it sounds like is that Musk has compared our existence to that of The Sims where he argues that the speed of our advancement in terms of technology makes it seem like we could be in some kind of simulated reality.
According to him, “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.”
He then adds, “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.”
Now obviously this is a question that would be impossible to answer as it would then beg the question of, who created the computers that simulated our reality? Is our “reality” based on their reality? You get the idea.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence), Augmented Reality (AR), Elon Musk and Virtual Reality (VR).