when i used to play "tokyo xtreme racer zero" (freeway racing video game), my ex gf would ask about the lives of the drivers in the civilian cars i was passing up (or crashing into). "i wonder where they are going and where they live. they must be driving to work or going to see their girlfriends in the middle of the night." i thought this was cute and even though there weren't actual drivers in the cars, there were little sims in there programed to drive like law abiding citizens to make the simulation i was playing seem more real.
that was almost 10 years ago. simulations are much more real now. enter simulated reality and sweedish transhumanist philosopher dr. nick bostrom.
----------
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors. - NY Times
----------
dr. nick puts us at about a 20% chance that we're living in a simulation right now. other simulation philosophers now propose that the "creator/designer" not tending to the simulation could be the reason why everything bad is happening. it could even just be for entertainment, hurricanes, famine, glitches and all. that's kinda heavy... and then i entertain myself with my own simulation glitch.
it cracks me up because of the realistic commentary by joe rogan, mike goldberg and the crowd chanting, but man i'd probably flip my wig if this happened in "real" life
20% this is a simulation? I like them odds! I need to find a videogame that involves playing somebody playing a videogame and see just how far I can bend probability backwards in on itself...
ReplyDeleteI think that's where social networks are heading to. We're heading to a point where we create our second person that inhabits the internet, and we feed of each other, only our second person lives forever and we don't.
ReplyDeleteIt's definitely feasible, and it isn't even work, people willingly already upload their thoughts and the relationships they make online, it's only a matter of time before a clever programmer (maybe me hahaha)decides to create AI based on that info.
Imagine, having a virtual bro that's exactly like you and lives online, that you talk to and he talks to his bros and they talk to their irl bros and everything we communicate is done via 3rd person.