Anyone who's seen The Matrix has surely at some point wondered whether they can really be certain that they're not actually living in a simulation.
How could you prove, definitively, that your life is in the 'real world' as opposed to one constructed for you?
It turns out this isn't just a thought experiment favored by stoners, but actually a genuinely meaningful philosophical debate that has been raging for quite some time, with massive names weighing in at different points.
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One of the biggest names is Elon Musk, who has made the argument a few times that we could be living in a simulation.
In fact, he goes much further than that, saying during Code Conference 2016 that there's a "one in a billion chance that this is base reality" - he's nearly certain that we are living in a computer-generated sim.
Musk's argument hinges on the idea that an inevitable rate of progress in technology has to mean that we eventually will have the capacity to run the sort of perfectly sophisticated simulation that would be required to dupe us all.
The alternative to this is that humanity goes extinct before it reaches that point, but as Musk puts it: "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will be indistinguishable from reality" once they get to a certain level.
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So, in a weird way, while it might seem like a theory that requires us to all be weird pseudo-slaves who may or may not even have physical forms, and that might be depressing, it's in fact an optimistic theory.
After all, in order for humanity to have managed to construct such simulations, it must have survived for a really long time to develop the required technology.
As Musk put it: "Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now, let's just imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale."
So, you might be able to frame this all as actually being a good thing.
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That said, it's probably best not to dive too far into the question of what will happen when AI gets incredibly advanced.
After all, the plot of The Matrix hinges on the idea that it isn't humanity that designed the perfect simulation, but rather the race of powerful AI-driven robots that have come to rule over them.
Given Musk has also stated that he thinks the risk of AI taking over humanity and wiping it out is fairly substantial, this could all come together into one somewhat hellish look at the future.