![]() ![]() I actually have a problem with that," she said. The argument says you'd have lots of things that want to simulate us. "It's just not based on well-defined probabilities. Randall added that it's incredibly egotistical for us to assume that some highly advanced civilization would build simulations that look just like us, and the probability argument only works if countless alien civilizations saw the human species as something worth simulating. So, probabilities are tricky, and you have to be careful what you mean when you're saying them." I mean, I could say really by probability I'm very likely to be Chinese, because there's a lot more Chinese than Americans. So, among all possible scenarios we can actually say which one is more or less likely," she said. "Part of the problem is that probabilities have to have a well-defined meaning, or are only useful when they have a well-defined meaning. "However, we can pretty much be sure that people will do amazing things and they will also mess up in spectacular ways."Īt a public debate last year moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Randall seized on Musk's probability argument as one of the biggest reasons for why the simulation hypothesis doesn't make sense. ![]() More to the point, there is no reason to believe that we do," she said. "At this point, we cannot prove that we do or don't live in a simulation. Last year, Elon Musk revealed that he's a big believer in the simulation hypothesis, arguing that "the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions".Īnd hell, it makes sense when you're going through weird times like these that something other than "base reality" is at play.īut Lisa Randall is here to ruin all our fun, because when Corinne Purtill from Quartz asked her if the recent Oscars mix-up has her rethinking her anti-simulation stance, the answer is not even a little bit. In a nutshell, Bostrom proposed that humans will either almost certainly die out before any of this even happens (thanks, climate change) no advanced civilizations in the history of the Universe contained individuals with the means to build ancestor-simulations or we almost certainly live in a simulation. But that's starting to sound a whole lot like us. Now imagine that a posthuman civilization in the distant future manages to build a massive network of these 'ancestor-simulations', into which we could upload replicas of the minds of our ancestors to play out their lives in a giant computer program.Īssuming these minds had a 'consciousness' - something that scientists have been considering recently - they would realistically demand something akin to human rights so they weren't some kind of robotic slave race. That 'posthuman' stage Bostrom is talking about refers to the probability that at some point in the future, our technology would be so advanced, a single computer could simulate the entire mental history of humankind, using less than one-millionth of its processing power for 1 second.
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