Have you ever had some of those philosophical thoughts where you question whether or not everything around you is real? Whether all that is happening is happening on its own or is this all just a part of a big matrix-like computer program?
If your answer is yes, congratulations! You are in some elite company.
Because believe it or not, Elon Musk also believes that we are living in a simulation.
And how strong is his belief? Very strong. In June this year, the real-life Iron Man responded to a question about computer simulation by saying that there’s only one-in-a-billion chance that the reality around us is the base reality.
Now there’s no way of finding out if he is right or not. But it’s Elon Musk, and he’s usually right. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO also added that he hopes this is true or else it means that humanity will cease to exist.
Speaking at a Recode conference, this is how Musk, who already has a research group that is training AI robots not to destroy the human race, responded to a question about whether he believes we are living in a simulation:
“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following. 40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable, and because we will not be able to distinguish real from unreal, It would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions. Otherwise, if civilisation stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that stops civilisation.”
And although there have been many theories like this from many people, when one of the smartest and most intelligent persons on the planet says so, it’s bound to get attention.
Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, recently told The New Yorker that there are two tech billionaires who have “gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.” And although he didn’t give a hint about who those two might be. Altman talked about how technology has already begun to control us and the best case scenario for us might be to actually merge with the machines.
“The merge has begun – and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. “The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud. I’d love that. We need to level up humans, because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever.”
Wow! What a time to be alive!
