Friday, June 10, 2016

What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation? - The New Yorker

I think it's time for me to reread Finite and Infinite Games...

"The posthuman future has never been easier to imagine—especially for those, like Musk, who work at the forefront of technology. Yet the idea that we are living in a kind of time loop adds a wrinkle to this dream. Maybe we’ll never reach the posthuman stage; at some point, technological development will cease. Perhaps our posthuman descendants simply won’t want to make simulations (although, given our own interest in doing so, that seems unlikely). Or perhaps our species will go extinct before we learn how to simulate ourselves. “Maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation,” Musk concluded, last week, since “either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.” If you hope that humanity will survive into the far future, growing in power and knowledge all the while, then you must accept the possibility that we are being simulated today."
What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation? - The New Yorker

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