Elon Musk's Question to AI: What's Outside The Simulation?

yeah there's that whole idea what if we were just a brain in a bat this is often posed by philosophers except we are a brain in a bath that vat is our skull everything that you perceive feel hear think it's all action potentials it's all just it's neural spikes and it feels so real it feels very real these are all uh impulses from neurons what's called a spike in the past century quantum mechanics revolutionized our understanding of physical reality at atomic scales while general relativity did the same for our understanding of reality at large scales there is a growing number of scientists who think that nature itself is the result of quantum computation according to them the world would in the last instance be rooted in physics particularly quantum mechanics and would reflect the properties of elementary particles and fundamental forces some contemporary world perspectives approach objects and physical laws in terms of information and computation to which they assign subsequent responsibility for the complexity in our world including responsibility for complex mechanisms and phenomena such as life [Music] one such world perspective held by many computer scientists and philosophers is the simulation hypothesis which provides the all of reality including the earth and the rest of the universe could in fact be an artificial simulation some versions rely on the development of a simulated reality a proposed technology that would be able to convince its inhabitants that the simulation was real the idea that we are living in a simulated reality may seem unconventional and irrational to many of us but it is a belief shared by some of the brightest minds of our time if you analyse the history of video games there is a clear innovation curve in the quality of games you know like say 40 years ago you had video games the most advanced video game would be like pong where you had like two rectangles and a dot you're like batting it back and forth and that was like wow that was a pretty fun game at the time but now you can see a video game that's uh photorealistic almost realistic and millions of people playing simultaneously and and you see where things going with virtual reality and augmented reality and if you extrapolate that out into the future with any rate of progress at all like even 0.1 percent or something like that a year then eventually those games will be indistinguishable from reality they'll be so realistic you will not be able to tell the difference between that game and the reality as we know it and then it seems like well how do we know that that didn't happen in the past and that we're not in one of those games ourselves augmented virtual and mixed reality technologies are evolving rapidly and becoming more powerful by the day however they are still easily distinguished from the experience of actuality participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience to create immersive experiences that are vr and mixed reality require complex scenes rendered at very high frame rates so based on the current rate of progress in 50 years or even 100 years vr could become indistinguishable from reality a gamer could immerse themselves in a simulated setting and may at some point find it difficult to distinguish reality from fiction the gamer becomes so immersed in the fictional reality that they do not realize they are simply a character in a simulation that leads us to an ultimate question are we living in a simulated universe [Music] ray kurzweil claims that in the future we could be able to simulate the human intelligence as original as the real thing so when that happens there won't be a difference between a simulation and our reality in the future we could merge with an agi which would enable limitless possibilities one being that we will be able to create a whole new universe in theory our whole universe could have been created by some super intelligence and it's quite plausible that our universe is a computer simulation sometimes i talk about we'll be able to simulate human intelligence and then some philosophers come and say well that's a simulation and that's not the real thing and if you simulate something as precise as the original thing i don't think actually there is a difference this universe could have been created by some super intelligence in another universe so maybe where our whole universe is a junior high school science experiment of some super intelligent junior high school student in another universe according to kurzweil we are just information structures you could argue and say that there are molecules and atoms that make you up but in reality depending on what cell it is it turns over in two weeks the parts of the neurons change over very quickly so we are completely different molecules and cells that we were just two weeks ago however we are not completely different information elon musk also supports the idea that we are living in a computer simulation according to him there's a billion to one chance we're living in base reality i mean there's some interesting things here on the virtual reality front um i mean just on the whole notion of a simulation which is that if if you just if you extrapolate into the future and say well how good let's say will video games be in a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years from now if if there's continued improvement um and you're in a full body have to suit with a sort of surround vision and you know it's it becomes beyond a certain resolution indistinguishable from reality um if any and they're likely to be they're likely to be millions maybe maybe billions of such simulations so then what are the odds that we're actually in base reality isn't it one in billions [Music] what's outside the simulation there may be ways to test whether it's a simulation there might be i'm not saying there aren't but you could certainly imagine that a simulation could correct that once an entity in the simulation found a way to detect the simulation it could either restart the you know pause the simulation start a new simulation or do one of any other things that then correct for that error [Music] to understand how we could be living in a simulation one needs to explore the simulation hypothesis or simulation theory bostrom developed an expanded argument examining the probability of our reality being a simulation his argument states that at least one of the following statements is very likely to be true one human civilization or a comparable civilization is unlikely to reach a level of technological maturity capable of producing simulated realities or such simulations are physically impossible to construct two comparable civilizations reaching aforementioned technological status will likely not produce a significant number of simulated realities one that might not push the probable existence of digital entities beyond the probable number of a real entities in the universe for any of a number of reasons such as diversion or computational processing power for other tasks ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities three any entities with our general set of experiences are almost certainly living in a simulation four we are living in a reality in which post-humans have not developed yet we are actually living in reality some speculate that simulations could have been created by an advanced artificial superintelligence or even an alien species the truth however is completely unknown neil degrasse tyson also finds it hard to argue against the simulation hypothesis you look at our computing power today and you say i have the power to program a world inside of a computer well imagine in the future where you have even more power than that you can create characters that have for example free will or their own perception of free will so this is a world and i program in the laws that govern that world that world will have its own laws of physics and chemistry and biology now you're a character in that world and you think you have free will and say i want to invent a computer so you do hey i want to create a world in my computer and then that world creates a world in its computer and then you have simulations all the way down so now you lay out all these universes and throw a dart which of these universes are you most likely to hit the original one that started it or the countless simulations the daughter simulations that unfolded thereafter you're going to hit a sim you're going to hit one of the simulations so statistically based on that argument which first appeared by a philosopher from oxford named nick boatstrom back in the 1990s right when computers were coming real enough to think this through it's hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parent's basement programming up a world for their own entertainment thanks for watching did you like this video then show your 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Channel: Science Time

Views: 825,064

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Keywords: Elon Musk, Musk, Simulation, are we living in a simulation, Ray Kurzweil, Neil deGrasse Tyson, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Simulation Hypothesis, Nick Bostrom, Simulation Theory, Technology, Science, Science Time

Id: lK0q812bAK0

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020