Episode: 169: Transcript
Episode: 169: No, We Don't Live in a F---ing Simulation!
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Hey, Annalee.
Annalee: [00:00:01] Hey, Charlie Jane.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:03] Did you know Will Smith recently started a frenzy about The Matrix?
Annalee: [00:00:08] Wait, what? Did it involve like him going back in time and like doing rap inside The Matrix?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] Oh my god, that would have been so great. So actually, Will Smith posted on his Instagram, he posted something kind of confusing on his Instagram, and part of it was dealing with...
Annalee: [00:00:24] Shocking.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:25] The fact that he had apparently been offered the role of Neo in the first Matrix movie and had turned it down because he wanted to do the movie Wild Wild West instead, which turned out to be a really bad decision. And you know, we'll never get to know what rap theme he would have done for The Matrix if he had done that movie, because that was back when all of his movies he had to do a rap theme. So sad.
Annalee: [00:00:46] I know. And like think about how that rave scene would have been different in Matrix Reloaded. It would have been a whole other thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:55] It would have been a whole other thing.
Annalee: [00:00:57] A whole other cringe, I should say.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:00] The part of that post was kind of weird and confusing about like, enter the Matrix, Will Smith. And like, it left people thinking that he was possibly going to be starring in the upcoming fifth Matrix movie, which apparently he is not going to be in that movie. And you know, I can't actually picture what the original Matrix from 1999 would have been like if it had starred Will Smith instead of Keanu Reeves.
[00:01:23] I suspect it would have been a lot like that movie I Robot, where he's kind of running around dealing with like robots. I think Will Smith would have been great. But I think Keanu Reeves was really perfect for that role. Like he's so good at seeming kind of lost and confused.
Annalee: [00:01:37] Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you brought up Wild Wild West. And I wanted to like that movie so much. I love the concept design in that movie. It's just so cool looking. And I love the idea of a sci-fi western, like a steampunky feeling. And like, by all rights, that movie should have rocked. And, you know, it was another Cowboys vs. Aliens kind of situation. It's like, why can't we make this happen? Like, there should be a big budget, incredible Will Smith type vehicle where it's like the Old West with cyborgs or something. And I guess Westworld maybe was trying to do that. But that Westworld is too like dark. I want something that's like, you know, just more fluffy, you know, like more Will Smithy.
[00:02:25] Like, that's the thing is if he had been Neo, the thing that's so great about Will Smith is he's so likable. And he always even when he's in a weird or rough situation, you always kind of get the sense that he's just going to like smooth his way on through, you know, he doesn't belong in a dystopian story, I feel like. unless he's the guy who's like, “we're going to kick this dystopia in the butt,” you know, and then it's like perfect. Like kick that dystopia in the butt Will Smith.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:54] I guess he spends a lot of the first Men in Black movie being kind of out of his depth and like, “oh, what's going on? Oh, gosh, I'm so confused.”
Annalee: [00:03:00] But that's different because it's more campy. It's still that's a much more happy.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:04] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:05] He's not like “I'm trapped in a simulation.” He's just like, you know, he's figuring it out. There's aliens.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:12] I think he could have definitely done a good job, but I think that Keanu was the right choice. I think Keanu owned that movie and it was just the right choice for that particular film. And I had forgotten that they are making a fifth Matrix movie. The Wachowskis, I believe, are not involved. I think Drew Goddard is making it. And, you know, I love the original Matrix. I love that trilogy in a lot of ways. But I also feel like maybe it's time for something different.
[00:03:37] Like, I feel like, you know, the original Matrix is such a product of 1990s cyberpunk and the whole visualization of cyberspace from the 90s. And I just like, what if we could have something new that kind of talks to the same themes of like not trusting reality and, you know, not trusting what technology is trying to show us about reality. I feel like maybe it's time for something new and different.
Annalee: [00:04:01] I totally agree. I mean, I've been feeling for a long time that it's time to get out of the cyberpunk frame of mind and get into what's coming next to, like, actually wrap our minds around how we're being manipulated in the 21st century as opposed to the 20th.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:17] Yeah, 100%.
[00:04:20] So you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast that went into a simulated reality and just tried to find deeper and deeper versions of the simulation to get lost in until everything was just polygons.
[00:04:32] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My upcoming book is Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it comes out in August. It's about a young witch who teaches her mom how to do magic.
Annalee: [00:04:44] And it is super great. I highly recommend everybody pre-order this damn book, because you're going to be glad that you did. Yeah.
[00:04:51] I am Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. And, hey, I'll plug my upcoming book, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:00] Yeah, it's so good.
Annalee: [00:05:02] I have a book coming out later this year called Automatic Noodle, which is about a group of robots who survive the terrible war of secession in which California became an independent nation. And now they just want to run a nice noodle shop. So check that out. You can also pre-order that.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:21] It's so amazing. I love it so much. If you loved Annalee's story Robot and Crow Saved St. Louis, this is a lot like that. It's just so beautiful.
Annalee: [00:05:30] Okay. Enough tongue bathing.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:31] So today we're going to be talking about the question of whether we live in a simulation, just like The Matrix, except that in a lot of popular, frequently discussed versions of this idea, it's not that we have physical bodies that are lying in pods somewhere, like covered with goop. We're all just virtual, simulated people moving through a virtual landscape in an entire universe that has been rendered by a computer somewhere. None of it is real. There's no real versions of us anywhere. And, you know, maybe it's not 2025 at all. Maybe it's the year 1 billion. We don't know.
[00:06:09] And it's like a fun thought experiment to think, ooh, what if none of this is real and we're just in a simulation? Except that nowadays, a lot of people increasingly believe that this is true, and that there's strong reasons to believe that we really do live in a simulation, which is kind of bonkers. It's kind of bizarre. So to find out more, I talked to two incredible experts, Professor David P. Williams and Paris Marx.
[00:06:34] And meanwhile, in our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about the classic, classic computer game, Oregon Trail, and why it just turns up in pop culture all the time.
[00:06:46] Okay, let's get virtual.
[00:06:48] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:07:19] Now we're incredibly lucky to be joined by Damien Patrick Williams, an assistant professor in philosophy and data science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Thanks for joining us, Damien.
Damien: [00:07:30] Thank you.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:31] So, you know, obviously the idea that we're living in a simulation is a fun thought experiment. It's like neat to consider. But where does the thing of people taking it seriously and treating it like it could be like a real thing or they believe it's a real thing, where do you think that comes from?
Damien: [00:07:46] Well, it has a long history, both within philosophy, but within popular culture, the idea that this universe could be a simulation or a fabrication, somehow not real. It gained popularity in the tech set within the last 22-ish, 24-ish years.
[00:08:10] You can look back to groups of people working around the idea, starting with people like Nick Bostrom, who kind of put this idea into the public consciousness that there's this notion that if a civilization gets advanced enough, then it will develop the capability to simulate consciousness and that if a civilization gets the ability to simulate consciousness, then it will almost certainly do so.
[00:08:42] And if it survives long enough to do so, then, and here's where it kind of makes a leap that I don't think conceptually, logically follows, we, us here today, are almost certainly living in a simulated universe.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:57] Yeah, that's the leap you mentioned is the one where I'm like, I mean, there's a couple leaps in there. There's a leap where it almost certainly will do so, which I'm like, why? Just because you can doesn't mean you will. And also that then that we're almost certainly and I feel like I've read through a lot of the arguments and like the arguments for like why it's going to be possible in the future boil down to, there's a whole argument about Pong, right?
[00:09:21] Where it's like, look how much more advanced our computers are now than when we had Pong. Therefore, future computers will be that much more advanced than what we have now, which again, you can quibble with that because Moore's Law has ended, like things don't proceed linearly forever.
Damien: [00:09:37] Correct. Exactly.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:38] Could you talk me through those kinds of arguments?
Damien: [00:09:40] Yeah, the Moore's Law argument, the notion that we'll just continually keep developing exponentially more powerful and exponentially smaller computer and processing capabilities. That has been around since Gordon Moore has noted that he was dealing with more transistors on a chip than they ever thought they were going to and that if things continued in the way they were going to, they would have they would move from 64 to 64,000 within the space of about 20 years.
[00:10:12] And that notion has persisted throughout the technology industry through computing for the past 70 years now. But it's never like an observed regular law of nature. It was just a statement of observation. And a supposition about what would be likely to happen if things did continue on that way.
[00:10:38] It was not like Gordon Moore saying “we've done rigorous research and we have found that it is always the case and will always be the case forever.” You know, we will always double our processing power and cut our size in half every 18 months. But it has been taken up as a law within computing and used as this kind of this goal to aim for this – target to reach for the past several decades.
[00:11:05] And so that notion has kind of fueled this idea that if that continues to happen, then computer processors will be so, so powerful and so, so small that they'll be able to be woven into literally every aspect of reality. We'll be able to integrate them with human consciousness because we'll be able to integrate them into human brains. We'll be able to actually map everything that happens inside the human body because we'll have integrated computers inside the human body, right? Extraordinarily powerful integrated computers inside the human body and every other facet of reality as well. So we'll be able to simulate everything because we'll have the data on everything at the atomic, if not subatomic level.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:44] Right. Everything is data and data is everything.
Damien: [00:11:48] Exactly. And so if everything is data and data is everything, if everything is information and everything can be reproduced informationally, then we can with enough data, with enough information, we can perfectly simulate everything that we might need to know.
[00:12:06] And again, that comes with a bunch of suppositions and it comes with a lot of leaps that don't necessarily always bear out the way that we think they will. The idea that we're going to be able to know everything, even if we were able to somehow weave computers into every aspect of reality, that we would be able to recognize and process it.
[00:12:27] There's also the problem that it takes more processing and computational power to describe a thing than it does for that thing, that function to take place in reality.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:40] Right. That explains why I saw a thing where somebody was like, “well, if we are living in a simulation, then the simulation must be happening in a universe that's even bigger than our universe because you'd need a bigger universe to simulate our universe in its entirety.”
Damien: [00:12:53] Exactly. It would have to be a bigger and more complex universe than the universe that we currently exist in, which is again, so far as our integrated understanding as we live inside this universe, kind of infinitely complex. So you go in order of infinity outside of the infinitely complex in order to simulate this universe in which we live, that we found over and over again, if you want to describe what it means to walk upright or for a bird to flap its wings and fly or fluid dynamics, right?
[00:13:29] Like all of those things, the amount of power it takes to describe them and then to replicate them in systems is vastly more energy, vastly more time than it takes for a human being to take a step forward or for a bird to take flight or for water to move downhill. And so all of those things would require so much power, so much complexity, so much energy that the kind of universe that we would have to exist nested inside of would have to be unimaginable to us, which is not to say that such an unimaginable thing is not possible. It's simply to say that that's not always what's accounted for in the claims about simulationism.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:13] Right. And like you could imagine a thing where some incredibly powerful future AI is like, “I'm setting up a set of rules for birds in general and each... I'm not going to describe each bird. I'm just going to be like birds equals this set of instructions. And then we're just going to randomly generate a bunch of birds and you know, I don't know.” And so then there's the idea that like our physics is so weird, like quantum mechanics is still very confusing, dark energy, dark matter. We don't really understand a lot of what's going on.
[00:14:42] That's got to be because we're in a simulation, because physics would make sense if we... which I don't know why you would bother to make a universe where physics doesn't make sense. It would be easier to make one where it's simple, right? I don't know.
Damien: [00:14:53] Right. If you had a universe where everything lined up perfectly. So like this is some very kind of interestingly inverted kind of hubris, but it's also this kind of... it's the type of need for certainty that fuels conspiracy thinking in a lot of ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:11] Right. Yes.
Damien: [00:15:11] This notion that things make sense and that things are clear. When you truly understand things, everything makes perfect sense. It lines up perfectly. And that's not necessarily true. Like we have no reason to believe... like elegance is something that we as human beings, we reach for, we shoot for it. We try to have elegant solutions that are harmonious, that make sense in a way that we can understand.
[00:15:42] But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything that is elegant and harmonious in the universe is going to be elegant and harmonious to us. It's going to make sense to us. That doesn't follow. Those things don't logically connect that way.
[00:15:57] The universe could have harmonies and rhythms that are in fact hostile to us. That are hard for us or that we don't necessarily logically recognize and that are easy for us when we don't try to logically grasp them. When we simply allow ourselves to move along with them or to flow in their patterns.
[00:16:18] All of those things are other possibilities as well as possibilities that again, maybe we just can't articulate because the way that we are, the way that we fit into the universe in our biological and physical and chemical constructions is not meant to grasp the actual complexity of everything that exists.
[00:16:37] And that's hard for me to say. I'm a person who likes to try to understand things, but some stuff doesn't make sense. And it might not ever. And that's a thing that has to be understood. That's a thing that has to be recognized by us that we might be limited in what we can understand. And that doesn't mean the universe is fake. That just means that we don't necessarily get to understand everything.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:04] My God, I'm actually getting chills because that is very, it's a chilling thought. It's a chilling thought that like, no matter how long humans exist, we might not understand everything in the universe. And I love how you tie it into conspiracy theories because that feels very true.
[00:17:16] So, okay, I want to just walk you through this. You're a super powerful AI, you know, a million years in the future. You have the ability to simulate an entire universe. You can simulate as many universes as you want, as many Earths within as many universes. So I just want to walk you through the decision tree. Like, first of all, why would you bother to do this?
Damien: [00:17:39] First stop, why bother? Understanding how I came to be might be one reason. It's one that I've heard that people put forward if I'm a super powerful artificial intelligence and I'm trying to recognize why these things have come to be or why things in the universe are the way they are. Going through the processes of seeing if something else was ever possible.
[00:18:02] If another way of the universe playing out. That gets into the, are we all in a deterministic mode or are probabilities really be widely variable? Like how much variability is there? So slaying out those possibilities might be one reason that I would go about making these simulations.
[00:18:25] That as a reason is interesting and motivating to me, the human being me, as a person who studies questions on things like free will and choice and determinism, that kind of thing is interesting to me. Would it be as interesting to me if I were a super powerful quantum AI billions of years in the future? I do not know. That's hard. It's difficult to put myself in that…
Charlie Jane: [00:18:53] We're literally trying to play God here, kind of. And if you have the power to do that and you want to study your origins, you could also just go to the other side of the universe and light from earth will be reaching you at that point in the future.
Damien: [00:19:07] Exactly.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:08] And you would have super powerful telescopes. I don't know. I'm just a spit-balling.
Damien: [00:19:11] So many other options and ways to go about reconstructing the history of these things. You get so quickly into the thought experiment of you're having to make up so many conditions and so many suppositions in order to justify why this would be the case. And it's like, well, maybe all of the records of human civilization have been destroyed somehow. All of the light transfer that could exist has been blocked or has been somehow it's being sucked into a supermassive black hole and destroyed and you're using the last of your power.
[00:19:48] And you start to spin out all of these potential very interesting scenarios that could be really cool stories, but they're not necessarily... they're in no way verifiable as to why would this be true.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:01] Yeah. And for the idea that we're most likely living in a simulation, it has to be iterative. The odds have to be strongly in favor of us being in a simulation because 21st century Earth has been simulated so many times by so many AIs that there's like a hundred simulated Earths for one real Earth. And so it has to be something that not just one time somebody decided to do this, but somebody decided to do this so many times.
Damien: [00:20:29] Right. And in order for that probability to have any anchoring for that, that idea to, you know, it is a near certainty that we live in a simulation for it to come from anywhere. We would have to have evidence of that. We would have to have like real evidence of previous simulations. We would have to have evidence of something outside of this simulation. We would have to have some way of measuring the reality that we exist within against some other benchmark of super reality, meta reality.
[00:21:05] The literal metaphysics of our existence would have to be measurable in some way that we don't have any real evidence for. And if we really have the evidence for it, a lot of times the question that gets posed is, then why should we care?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:25] Well, that's also... I mean, it's a thought experiment that basically has no bearing on reality unless you decide “nothing is real. Therefore, I'm just going to go on a killing spree,” which I feel like, you know, that might actually be a thing that could happen.
[00:21:39] But so final question, I'm this, you're this superpower to AI, a billion years in the future. You've decided to simulate 21st century Earth and an entire universe around it. What about informed consent? Why don't you, why don't you bother to let people know that they're living in a simulation? I mean, obviously it would take the results of your experiment, but isn't there like ethics? Don't you care about ethics at this point?
Damien: [00:22:02] Again, human me, I care about ethics a great deal. And I think that the informed consent of those upon whom you're experimenting is extraordinarily important. As the super powerful AI… Well, let's spin this out again in a little bit of a thought experiment. Let's think about where the roots of a super powerful AI billion years in the future would have come from. What kind of projects, what kind of work, the kinds of people who are really, really focused on building these things. And then let's think about what those kinds of people and their project tend to think about informed consent.
[00:22:34] Probably not high on the list of priorities of the things that get created out of the process, right? Like the idea that it is for the greater good, that it is for the good of the many outweighing the needs of the, I don't know, eight billion. The idea that runs through long-termism and ethical altruism that's run within transhumanism and simulationism, you know, back since the 90s and the 80s.
[00:23:03] These ideas have always said if we're talking about a civilization of trillions of lives and minds at some point, billions of years in the future, then we are talking about an order of magnitude and multiple orders of magnitude, more lives and concerns than we are dealing with now. And so in order to safeguard their continued existence, in order to make sure that they in some nebulous and always very well-defined way can continue to survive by means of this super-powered AI, what happens to us in the simulation, if we are in a simulation, our simulated lives that run through the scenarios that might lead to better outcomes for those trillions in the future, they don't matter if we suffer.
[00:23:54] It doesn't matter if we have to run through all of the pain and all of the turmoil and the war and famine and genocide. That's just a trial run. We're trying to avoid that for the really real people outside of the simulation. The so-called non-simulation people will benefit from the suffering of those who go through the simulation.
[00:24:21] But again, we come back around to if we are in a simulation, you and I right now, and there's no way for us to measure that, for us to know what exists outside of it, for us to be certain that there is something outside of it, then we simply live in a universe. Same as we did yesterday. Same as we did before. We live in a universe. We continue to exist within a reality. And the things that happen to us are the things that happen to us.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:50] Right. Yeah. It doesn't actually change anything. If we could even know one way or the other, nothing would really change.
Damien: [00:24:56] Right. And so that suffering that we go through, that we experience as a part of our living in this universe, it's real for us. And this is an objection that stretches all the way back to the 17th century and the objections to Renee Descartes' evil demon hypothesis and brain in a bat stuff that came subsequently from that. These questions about if you live in a simulated universe in some way or form, do you know and experience reality?
[00:25:25] If it's the only thing you can know, if there's no way for you to verify an outside world outside of your brain in a bat, outside of your matrix existence, outside of your evil demons constructed universe, there are no hallmarks that will tell you otherwise. And all you have is the universe you live in, then all you have is the choices you can make and the experiences you can have within it.
[00:25:46] And so if someone or something is doing this to people and making the kinds of suffering that you see, that is a morally bankrupt and ethically suspect thing that is currently creating these things. So why in any way, shape or form should we see it as laudable?
Charlie Jane: [00:26:08] Yeah.
Damien: [00:26:08] Why should we seek?
Charlie Jane: [00:26:11] Yeah, it would basically be like an evil… It would be like a demon kind of like like Descartes said, it would be it would be not our friend.
Damien: [00:26:18] Not at all.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:18] Yeah. Can you just tell folks where to find you online?
Damien: [00:26:22] Yeah, I'm online at Bluesky. My handle on there is wolvendamian. My website is afutureworththinkingabout.com. Those are the two main places to find the things that I do.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:35] Awesome. Thank you so much.
Damien: [00:26:36] Thanks for having me.
[00:26:38] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:26:41] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is actually not a simulation, and therefore we actually need – you know – money to make it happen. And thanks to you, we’re able to do that, because this is an independent podcast funded by listeners through Patreon.
[00:26:57] And if you become a patron, you can help make it happen. You can help pay our amazing producer, Niah. You can help pay contributors. You can help pay for like us to say, you know, host this thing and make it available to you. And also, you know, just give us a little extra cash to keep our opinions correct.
[00:27:16] It's really important that we we feed ourselves calories to do that. And so if you do support us, I like how Charlie's like, “I do need calories.” So if you support us, you get access to our Discord channel where we hang out. Plus, we have mini episodes twice a month, which are sometimes even more exciting than our maxi episodes. And so think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month.
[00:27:40] Just find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and we can break out of the simulation together.
[00:27:47] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:51] So now, we’re lucky to be joined by Paris Marx, the host of Tech Won’t Save Us and the author of the Disconnect newsletter. Thanks for joining us, Paris.
Paris: [00:28:00] Absolutely. It’s great to speak with you. I’m a fan of the show, so it’s cool to be on it, myself.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:04] We're such huge fans of yours. So yeah, I mean, in episode four of Data Vampires, you talk a lot about this notion that we're living in a simulation and the fact that like a lot of tech billionaires such as Elon Musk have really embraced this idea. And, you know, I have my own thoughts about why that might be. But I'd love to hear your thoughts about like what it is that attracts them to this hypothesis.
Paris: [00:28:26] Definitely. You know, I've heard it said in the past, I can't remember who said it, but that, you know, if you are as rich and as powerful as some of these people, it might make sense to think that you're living in a simulation because like your life is just so unreal and like disconnected to what most people's lives actually look like.
[00:28:46] So I think maybe that's a piece of it, but I actually think it's actually much deeper than that in the sense that like these are people who, yes, grew up on science fiction, but also like really kind of fetishize the digital in a way that I think a lot of normal people really don't.
[00:29:02] And so this desire to be consumed by the computer, to join with the computer, to be part of it, is I think that's something that's really deep in a lot of these people's like worldview and has become so even more since they have, you know, kind of made their fortunes off of the success of the internet and the growth of the internet. And so I think we see that reflected in a lot of, you know, their views on the world, the things that they say, the actions that they take because, you know, they do… They want to believe that maybe in some sense we are already in a simulation, but if not, they want us to reach the point where we can be living in a simulation because we do merge with computers and our brains can be computers and all this kind of stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:45] Yeah, and part of what I wonder is two things. One is: what you kind of alluded to the idea that we want to reach the point where we eventually can simulate consciousness, we can simulate reality. That reflects back to this idea that all consciousness is just… it’s just information. There's nothing special about consciousness. There's nothing special about self-awareness. And in some ways it kind of degrades consciousness and it kind of make consciousness into something that can be recreated in a computer. And obviously for their purposes, it erases the line between human beings and artificial consciousness, which is something that they're very interested in.
[00:30:23] But it also... one of the objections to the idea of just like simulating all of us is that there's something biological about us that makes us who we are. And like, I feel like the mind-body divide there very much on like mind is everything and body is nothing. I'd love to hear you speak to that.
Paris: [00:30:37] I think that's completely true, right? And I think it kind of takes that metaphor of the brain as a computer and imagines it to be reality, right? Rather than, you know, a metaphor as it is. And I think it's really troubling in the sense that it can really allow you, you know, if you're someone who really believes this and is as disconnected from humanity and like the lived human experience of so many people as these people are, that I think it can lead you in a direction where, you know, you feel justified in making decisions that are going to be very harmful to a large number of people because, you know, you are pursuing, you know, this very kind of niche and narrow desire to achieve a certain kind of future because, you know, it's the one that you fetishize from science fiction or what have you.
[00:31:24] I would see the generative AI push and part of the justification behind it that we hear from people like Sam Altman is the pursuit and the attainment of AGI, artificial general intelligence, the notion, the idea that computers are going to reach this level of human consciousness and cognition that I personally think is, you know, like science fiction in itself is something that will never be achieved.
[00:31:49] You know, I'm very skeptical of just the idea that computers can reach this level ever, you know, let alone in the next few years. But you start to see the consequences of like the massive energy requirements for this. You know, all of the infrastructure that's needed for it and the sacrifices that are necessary just to try to get closer to this vision, let alone really realizing it.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:11] Yeah. And, you know, obviously the mind-body thing, like, you know, I've hacked my consciousness. I took estrogen. It changed my consciousness and how it operates. Like I'm very, I've experienced firsthand how my body and my mind are connected and it feels very strange to like, just assume that we can all just be pure mind and that's all we need to be.
Paris: [00:32:31] I feel like there was a time in my life when I believe that a lot more too, right? Like kind of saw myself as my mind and like the mind being such like a key thing. But I feel like the more that, you know, you understand more about your body and how it works. It's like, it's so ridiculous to think that the brain can be disconnected from like what we are and that, you know, the kind of broader physicality of our body does not affect like, you know, everything else that's going on and that we could live as like this isolated brain in a vat somewhere or something like that's not what we are.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:00] Right. So, the other kind of thing that I think about when I read about people like Musk, but also other tech leaders kind of embrace this simulation hypothesis is it kind of makes me wonder if they think most people are NPCs.
Paris: [00:33:14] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:14] Or if they, there's some part of me with them that's like, “well, you know, we're all simulated consciousnesses, but some of us maybe are more sophisticated consciousness.” I don't know. It just, it feels like that would be the logical next step is if we're in a similar, like that you see that in The Matrix where it's like some people are real and similar programs.
Paris: [00:33:29] I think you definitely see it, right? I think you see it in the statements that these people make that you see from Elon Musk in particular, when he's talking about, you know, IQ and how people with high IQ should be valued much more. And of course we all know the kind of racist history of IQ as a metric of measuring intelligence, you know, and how it's designed to make sure that white people and that wealthy people and stuff are, you know, able to perceive and position themselves as being inherently superior to other people.
[00:34:00] And so I think that you see that discussion very clearly, but I think as well, like when you go into these like long-termist and effective altruist discourses where they're not only talking about how the wealthy and the powerful should be able to decide on behalf of the rest of society, like what we pursue and to make these sacrifices that are in supposedly the very long-term interest of society, but in the short term are going to have a lot of very negative effects that you can only really make those calculations where you know a lot of people are going to be harmed or poisoned for, you know, the potential benefit of people like millions of years from now.
Paris: [00:34:36] If you do see the vast majority of people on the planet as people who don't really matter, right? Who are just like, who are just metrics in a calculation that you're making, not actual people who are living lives, who have connections to so many other people, you know, who have like deep inner lives, who are trying to do better for themselves, you know, who have these deep personal relationships with so many people around them. Like all of that has to go out the window just like a number on a spreadsheet or in some calculation that you're making for this like grand future that you're planning because you have such an unimaginable amount of wealth that you can, you know, have these broader effects on society that very few people can actually have, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:35:19] Right. One thing that science fiction has been very insistent about, like there's this great novel called Everyone in Silico by Jim Munroe, a Toronto author, about people being put in a virtual world. And the virtual world is owned by a corporation which wants to show you ads and like also starts cutting corners. And so sometimes the trees are just kind of very low res. Sometimes, you know, the sky is just sort of like not really there. It's just like we didn't bother to render that today.
Paris: [00:35:45] That's the simulation most of us will be living in and they would be in like the fully rendered.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:49] Yeah, absolutely. And if you're living in a simulation, someone's controlling it. Someone is God in your universe. And like it's sort of a fantasy about control, right? You know, someone gets to be not in the simulation getting to decide what you see and experience.
Paris: [00:36:05] Yeah, it brings me back to like, you know, on the one hand, we can think of the political systems that we live in now that are like ostensibly democracies, but where these very powerful people do exhibit this level of control that few people can even imagine over our lives. And that is increasing now as we have the second Trump presidency and the influence that an Elon Musk and, you know, these tech figures have in it.
[00:36:26] But then you also think about like the fantasy of living on Mars as well, right? And the control that is inherent in that kind of a vision, right? Control, not just over how you live, but also like your ability to access oxygen and these other things that are essential for life because of how inhospitable a planet like that is.
[00:36:45] But I think in these visions of the future that these people talk about, you know, someone like Elon Musk talks about a multi-planetary species and all of this kind of stuff. When you dig into, you know, the long-termist vision and like the futures that they're talking about, they want to colonize other planets, but often the process of colonization is not one where you're bringing humans to set up a colony, but to develop massive computer systems where like AGI's and, you know, fake computer people are like living in these massive basically data centers that are being created on these other planets throughout the solar system and the universe and the galaxy or what have you.
[00:37:24] You know, it's right there. The idea that we're going to live in assimilation if we're not already is like built into the broader vision that we're supposedly supposed to be sacrificing, you know, as a collective society right now to achieve. And it's like if people really understood what these people are expecting of us or what kind of future they are trying to build, is that something that most people would be on board with? I think absolutely not.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:47] Yeah. And that's the next thing I was going to ask about because when you mentioned earlier, the long-termist vision of like putting the needs of people millions of years from now ahead of the needs of people today and those people millions of years from now, they're simulated people. They're people living in this imaginary future. You can create trillions and trillions of people who would be as valid as like the biological people living now. Everything would be the Sims.
[00:38:08] So, I mean, part of the simulation hypothesis is that like we are living in a simulation that has been created by an AI millions of years in the future or possibly thousands of years in the future. It's actually not 2025. It's actually 3025. It's an ancestor simulation. They've created a simulation of the past, sort of like in The Matrix. And like I always think that the computer that would do that or the person that would do that a thousand years from now would be some kind of sociopath who just wanted to torture us for no reason.
[00:38:37] I mean, maybe there's some study that they're doing, but it feels very sociopathic. And I'm like, I know you've gone through a lot of audio and text of like people wrangling this. When you kind of look at that stuff, do you feel like people are identifying with the computer that's putting us in the simulation? Or do you think that they're just feeling like a nihilism of like we are trapped in a simulation that we cannot control and therefore nothing matters? Or is it a little of both?
Paris: [00:39:00] Well, I would say the people who I pay the most attention to are obviously the people who are powerful, right? And I think in that sense, they do identify with the computer, the person who or whatever entity is kind of setting the parameters of what the simulation is going to be. And so I feel like that is the part of this that they identify with. I think you can certainly hear people like Elon Musk talking about, “oh, maybe we live in a simulation” and as though he's like the subject of the simulation, right? Just someone existing within it.
[00:39:29] But I think that when you start to hear them talk about these fantasies for what the future would be, and you're building these massive simulations, obviously they are the people who are setting up the simulations, who are setting the expectations or the ideas of how this simulation is going to operate, what is going to be simulated.
[00:39:46] And even as you're talking about with like the ancestor simulations, I feel like when you read people like Nick Bostrom's work there, they're talking about people setting up simulations, if I'm not wrong, setting up ancestor simulations, setting up other types of simulations. Maybe the idea of the computer doing it comes later.
[00:40:02] But I feel like they're talking in much more of a sense that there is some sort of agency and some sort of power that is being exerted in the creation of those things.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:12] These people are like the ultimate control freaks.
Paris: [00:40:15] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:15] And yet they're embracing a fantasy where they have no control, where they live in a simulation that can be turned off tomorrow, where Elon Musk could be trying to colonize Mars, but then the simulation is like, “oh, Mars doesn't exist anymore.” Like, is this masochism? Is it like they secretly long to not be able to? Why would they fantasize about not having any control over reality at any level?
Paris: [00:40:38] That's fascinating. And I'm not super sure. I feel like when they think about the simulation, you know, just thinking about the ways that I've heard them talk about it, I feel like if you hear someone like Elon Musk talk about it, like, yes, he can talk about this notion that he is living in a simulation, but it doesn't feel like he ever considers that kind of next step that you're talking about where the simulation can be changed, can be altered to make his like grand goals inachievable or something like that.
[00:41:03] And I feel like the flip side of it, the piece that you hear them talk about more and more is the part where, you know, they have some sort of control, some sort of agency, like, you know, the kind of merging of man and machine and the creation of simulations in some far future is actually giving them greater power and authority and skills, I guess, even that, you know, the regular person would not necessarily have.
[00:41:30] Yeah, I wonder if they see it that way at all, right? Where they are losing some degree of power, but rather, you know, their whole idea of what the future should be is just affected by their position within it, how weird their position within it is, and their desire to exert greater power to try to achieve and realize some sort of future that they've kind of absorbed from the various media and things like that, that they have consumed over their lives and want to see realized and feel that they have the resources to try to realize regardless of the wider impacts and consequences that that might have.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:05] Right. So basically, someone has to be God and eventually it'll be them.
Paris: [00:42:08] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:09] Can you tell people where to find you?
Paris: [00:42:11] Absolutely. I host a podcast called Tech Won't Save Us that you can find on any podcast platform. I also launched a new one with my friend Brian Merchant called System Crash at the end of last year. And yeah, I have a newsletter called Disconnect, too. And if you want to find me on social media, I'm usually on Bluesky these days, but Paris Marx anywhere else, you'll probably find a profile for me that I might post to sometimes.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:31] Awesome.
[00:42:32] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:35] Thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just somehow found this podcast lying around on a beach somewhere…
Annalee: [00:42:45] In the gutter.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:45] You can find it wherever you find podcasts and please subscribe, leave a review wherever you can leave reviews, like give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. It really helps a lot to keep our podcasts going. Also, please support us on Patreon, patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:43:01] You can also find us at Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, all of the virtual, you know, smoke parlors. Thanks so much to our incredible producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music and thanks again to you for listening.
[00:43:17] We'll be back in two weeks with another episode, but we'll have a mini episode a week from now for our Patreon subscribers. And if we're a patron, we'll also see you in Discord.
Both: Bye!
[00:43:28] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]