‘We Are Living in a Simulation and If We’re Not the World Will End’ Elon Musk Warns
SERIAL entrepreneur Elon Musk has made the sensational claim we are most likely living in a computer simulation, and warned that if we aren’t, our world will probably end soon.
The tech genius, who is responsible for companies such as PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, said that the ‘reality’ we live in is probably made by artificial intelligence (AI).
Musk, who has been dubbed the real-life Tony Stark for his futuristic conceptions, highlighted the progress of video games and said that this almost certainly proves that we too are just computer simulations.
Speaking at the Code tech conference in California, Mr Musk said: “The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following.
Everything we know may be powered by AI
“40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were.
“Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality.
“If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.”
He furthered his argument by saying that even if the progress of video games dropped drastically, they would still be advancing significantly relative to real life.
This means that games will soon become as realistic as real life, and that “it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions”.
Mr Musk added that we should hope that we are living in a simulation, “otherwise, if civilisation stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that stops civilisation”.
He then said that we will progress to a point where simulations are indistinguishable from reality, “or civilisation will cease to exist”.
