A hot topic around our office water cooler the past week as been the recent New York Times article that puts forward the idea by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom that we might all be living in a computer simulation. What’s fascinating about the concept is not that it just might be possible, but that – if Bostrom’s calculations are correct – it is actually probable that we’re living in some sort of a simulation.
The logic goes like this: you calculate the likelihood that we will eventually develop a computer simulation that is sufficiently complex as to develop self-awareness. If the likelihood is high, as Bostrom estimates that it is, then the likelihood increases that such a simulation has already been created by someone else, and that we are living within that simulation.
My ramblings can’t do this concept justice. Just read the article.
Now, some people might find this disturbing, but I’m not going to start worrying about it. After all, if we ARE in some elaborate computer simulation, there’s no way we’d be able to find out for sure, and nothing practical we could do with the information if we had it. So, relax.
Besides, from long experience in working with start-ups who have had as their goal creating simulated environments, there’s one thing I’ve learned with great certainty: creating simulated environments is hard. It’s one thing to create a computer that can beat you at chess; it’s quite another to create one that will decide on its own that it prefers to play Madden 08.
This unease about the immediate future of technology is nothing new. Science and technology reporting, as well as science fiction, is rife with stories of technological nightmares that lie just around the corner. In the earlier parts of the 20th century, there were dire warnings about the robots, the mechanical men who would rise up and destroy us all.
Westinghouse's H. J. Wensley and his mechanical man, "Mr. Televox" in 1928
In the latter parts of the century it was fear of the run amok computer, in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Colossus: The Forbin Project. By the 1980s, the robots and computers had joined forces to rid the world of humanity in films like The Terminator. We always seem
to be one step away from having our tools take over for us altogether.
But it never happens.
Why? It’s because the nightmare we can imagine is a nightmare that’s already under our technological control. If we can build a killer robot, we can build an appropriate fail-safe. This doesn’t mean that things can’t go horribly wrong – they can and they do. It just means that, for now, the likelihood of our machines becoming more sophisticated than us is very, very
unlikely.
Until The Singularity comes, that is. Then all bets are off.
Run for your lives!!!
Loren
