Dave Martin

When you play games like The Sims (or other similar mobile games) you have to get your characters to do a whole bunch of shit, get jobs, make and spend money, sometimes make friends and find partners and have babies and there’s also a bunch of time where your characters sleep and also either have to, or involuntarily, stand or sit around doing fuck all.

Does that sounds familiar at all?

I’ve already crapped on about how all this and everyone and everything in your life could be a dream but Nick Bostrom argues that there is the possibility that all this and everyone and everything in your life and in the world is a post-human race (perhaps a AI-human hybrid one) in the distant future is running (or re-running) a computer simulation of history of their own past (so, which is us right now). And discusses how likely and how much interest our post-human descendants will have in creating computer simulations, which has a direct result on whether we are in one now.

Bostrom concludes his mind-fucking paper with:

Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.

If humans are advancing to the point where we are already merging technology with ourselves, is it not a sure thing that (barring a calamitous non AI-ey event and annihilation of our species) we will evolve with AI to be able to recreate past simulations of ourselves. And is it impossible to think we might one day create a simulation where we either replay history or let it play out for our own entertainment (ie. all the shit that has happened until now and is happening right now)?

And here’s another take on it:

And another cool one where an ant gets confused by an amusement park:

Thing is though, right, in the Sims, do they ever actually start to question whether they’re in a simulation? If our future simulations are as basic as that, then it could be fundamentally flawed. But that’s assuming a super-genius post-human race is dumb enough to to make simulated humans that question whether they’re in a simulation. But actually, that might be more entertaining and funnier for them to watch humans fuck themselves up over thinking these things without knowing the truth.