So, Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla motors, thinks we’re all living in a computer simulation. Here’s a devastating counterargument: This can’t all be a video game, since in a video game no one would care about the Model 3. Ask yourself: When’s the last time you commandeered a hybrid in “Grand Theft Auto”?
But let’s treat Musk’s beliefs a bit more seriously. Here he is at Recode’s Code Conference 2016 explaining his views:
The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following: 40 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.
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.
So given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played 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.
Tell me what’s wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?
Well, let’s see.
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