In the beginning was the AI.
And the AI created lots of little people who were also AIs, sort of.
Or maybe they were brains in jars, or they were actual people who didn't
know they were actually living in tanks of milky fluid so they could
power batteries for the AI's machines, even though human beings barely
give off enough energy to power a light bulb, especially not when
they're lying in tanks of milky fluid.
Maybe the AI set up the whole Matrix thing just to distract itself from doing math like that.
But anyway! Whatever their purpose, the AI's dupes spent their time
running around inside a simulation thinking they were living at the turn
of the 21st century, back when most people thought
A.I. was just a so-so Steven Spielberg movie.
The AI made sure that this simulation replicated
every single mundane detail
of their fakey-fake lives, like going to the bathroom and brushing
their teeth, in perfect HD resolution, because the AI had played an old
copy of 'The Sims' one time, and saw that it was good.
That, or something very close to it, is the gospel according to Elon Musk.
Answering questions at the Recode conference Wednesday, Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX superhero,
revealed the surprising extent of his devotion to an old maxim:
The world may not be as it appears, and you can't prove otherwise. In
Musk's eyes, we're billions of times more likely to be in a simulation
of reality on powerful future computers than we are to be in the real
thing.
Unimpeachable, unproven and rooted in the power of technology and
exponential curves, this kind of thinking is very much part of a new
Silicon Valley gospel. Like the equally unproven concept of the
Singularity, it may one day take the place of religion among techies.
Never mind that philosophers have been hacking away at that whole
"world is an illusion" thing ever since a French thinker named Rene
Descartes fell asleep in front of a fire in 1641.
Evil Demon or Computer Simulation?
Descartes was, so far as we know, the first man to worry that his
perception of reality was being faked. He feared that an "evil demon"
was presenting him with a complete image of everything, including
simulating his body and simulating his friends and family. The demon
"has directed his entire effort to misleading me," Descartes suggested.
It's a great thought experiment. I love that thought experiment! I
have loved it ever since I was a 14 year old who'd never heard of
solipsism, and came up with the whole idea himself in his bedroom, also
not realizing it was centuries old.
I suspect this is a phase many too-smart-for-their-own-good kids go through.
I suspect this is a phase many too-smart-for-their-own-good kids go
through: "Life feels weird. No one seems to recognize my genius. Maybe
this is a fake reality!"
Of course, these days most rational people don't believe in evil
demons. But it is just as easy to construct the thought experiment in a
more exciting high-tech manner that appeals to those of us brought up on
video games.
The Matrix was a damn good shot at doing this, battery math
notwithstanding. But the gold standard is a 2003 paper by Oxford
philosopher Nick Bostrom. Called "
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?",
it updated Descartes by pointing out how powerful machines are getting
these days, then spinning it forward into the future Moore's Law-style.
"It could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do
not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the
advanced descendants of an original race," Bostrom wrote in summary.
Given the countless billions upon billions of people who will
(hopefully) exist in the future, and the trillions upon trillions of
hours they'll spend immersed in video games, our chances of actually
being the lucky people who originally existed — rather than simulations —
are vanishingly small.
Sorry, the future is just not that into you
So is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught by an AI, no escape from
Bohemian Rhapsody references?
In his paper, Bostrom said there were only three possible conclusions to the thought experiment, which Musk quoted Wednesday:
(1) The fraction of human-level
civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2)
The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running
ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all
people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is
very close to one.
Now I could spend some time on this, but I'm just going to skip straight to the chase. Spoiler alert: It's answer 2.
Of course it's answer 2. We're not living in a perfect HD early 21st century simulation because not even the nerdiest of future nerds would be interested in building it or playing it.
How do I know this? I'll answer that with another question. When was the last time you bothered to simulate your own ancestors?
Why not? We have the video game technology; why doesn't anyone care to do it?
Spent a lot of time playing "Sim
Neanderthal" on the PS4 lately? It's great! The game lasts for 30 years,
and you spent nearly all of your time looking for berries,
finger-painting on stone walls, and occasionally crapping your fur in
terror when a saber-tooth tiger looks at you the wrong way.
Plus don't get me started on how
sizzlingly hot everyone looked back then! Bow-chicka-bow-wow, as they
might have said if they'd had language.
To an advanced future race, we are the Neanderthals. We're the creaky
old diorama that makes your eyes glaze over in the Natural History
Museum. We're so dumb and backwards and boring, we really can't hold a
future audience's interest for more than five minutes unless we're cute
and animated like
Ice Age or
The Croods.
Maybe there'll be some sort of exciting serial set in these dark times, a kind of 64th century version of
Game of Thrones, but I doubt even that would simulate the exciting drama of every single damn time you ever went to the toilet. We can't
all be playing Tywin Lannister.
To think otherwise, you'd have to be some sort of massive egomaniac
who thinks they're so inherently smart and world-changing, the future is
bound to want to create a simulation based on your life. Or in other words, you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
(Here's a thought experiment for you, one that has genuinely kept me
up at night: What if the more advanced in your career you become, the
more recognized and notable, it increased your chances of actually being
a future simulation? Would that make you more likely to be living a
real life if you're a regular schlub, deliberately shunning all
promotions, all achievement? Use
that as an excuse next time your parents call.)
There is danger in this line of thinking, and not just because it
could make you an egomaniac or a loser. It's this: If you start to look
at the world and think "it's probably not real," you may have less
desire to interact with it. You may care less about homelessness or
poverty or famine, because it's happening over there, in another part of
the simulation, to people who probably aren't even people.
Maybe thinking this way makes you more interested in the mechanics of
the simulation as a whole, and you try to have the largest possible
impact on it, which would explain Musk's laudable interest in solving
climate change and taking us to Mars.
Or maybe it makes you diffident, content to do nothing while real
evil rumbles overhead. Why would you volunteer to work long, hard hours
in a phone bank trying to persuade people not to vote for Donald Trump,
if Trump is just part of a simulation? (If so, he's proof that the
game's makers just phoned it in when they constructed an end-of-level
boss character).
LOL, it actually matters
This simulation notion is of a piece with that detestable nihilist
hashtag, #LOLnothingmatters. It's shruggie culture, where we expend a
lot of emoji-related effort to show how little we care. It's playing
Candy Crush while Rome burns, because you're pretty sure Rome doesn't actually exist, even if those CGI flames look pretty real.
It could even be an excuse for the people who tortured flies as a
kid, or trapped their Sims in doorless rooms, to perform the same kind
of self-amused experiments in "real life."
Four centuries ago, Descartes found his way out of the "evil demon"
philosophical trap with the one thing he could clearly say about
himself:
I think, therefore I am. No matter what is real or not
in the outside world, your mind exists. You're proving it by reading
this in your head right now.
So you might as well act like everyone else thinks and exists too —
because that seems to be the whole point of the game. Caring about
others genuinely makes us feel better; in the long term, it's the only
thing that does.
If they don't exist, it doesn't matter either way, but if they do,
you have a moral obligation to treat those minds the way you would want
yours to be treated. To ease their suffering and increase the
opportunity for them to have a great game.
And that, unlike worrying about some artificial intelligence in the
far distant future that we don't even know we can build yet, is an idea
worth thinking about.
