Those who have wondered if we're all living in some kind of simulation will want to hear about Elon Musk's view on the matter, as he said recently that he believes we're all living in someone else's video game.
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, expressed this idea at this year's Recode Code Conference, saying that there's a "one in billions" chance that we're actually living in reality.
"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," he explained. "Now, forty years later, we have photorealistic, 3-D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality."
Musk added that given the rate of improvement of technology in video games, people will eventually not be able to tell the difference between the games and reality, even if the rate drops by a thousand from the current rate, further suggesting how much it will improve 10,000 years from now.
"So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are distinguishable from reality, and those games could be on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions," he said.
Musk's argument is similar to that of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who wrote about his views on the chance of us actually living in reality in a paper titled "Are You in a Computer Simulation?" Bostrom is among Silicon Valley's favorite philosophers, and he is well known for his research into existential risk.
The Code Conference follows almost six months after Musk announced the creation of the non-profit organization OpenAI with other tech giants in order to research how to make sure artificial intelligence benefits humanity instead of turning on us and creating a future like the ones seen in "Terminator" and "X-Men: Days of Future Past." The fear of AI wiping out humanity is a common concern among tech experts like Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, and Bostrom even covers the subject in his latest book, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies."
Musk also said at the conference that we should hope that our "one in billions" chance of not living in a simulation is accurate.
"Arguably we should hope that that's true, because if civilization stops advancing, that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization. So maybe we should be hopeful this is a simulation, because otherwise we are going to create simulations indistinguishable from reality or civilization ceases to exist. We're unlikely to go into some multi-million year stasis," he said before challenging anyone to find a flaw in his argument.
