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Opinion | Philosophy
The Singularity is Already Here
The merger between humans and machines already happened.
In 2003, Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford, Nick Bostrom formulated his simulation hypothesis in a paper called, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Bostrom used mathematical probability and logic to determine that it’s more likely that we’re living in a computer simulation than reality. The Internet has been awash with spooky, hypothetical discussions of the theory and its implications since. Everyone from top-tier philosophers to Elon Musk and Joe Rogan have discussed exactly that scenario. You’ve probably pondered it yourself.
Bostrom’s argument hinged on the idea that, with technology’s rapidly ascendant growth, we’re perched on the precipice of a “posthuman” stage of evolution, when humans take a back seat and machines run the show. He argued humans are “very likely to go extinct” before reaching that stage, with ever-present global threats like climate change and nuclear war. Follow this line of thinking down the rabbit hole, and it becomes clear: either humanity is soon obliterated or we live in a simulation. The longer humanity survives without annihilation, the better the chances we’ve survived long enough into the future to build machines capable of creating simulations of their history—and our current lives are those simulations.
Any one society wouldn’t build a single simulation, but many, and eventually, other societies would follow suit, building their own simulations. Thus, because there would be multitudinous artificial realities, and one “true” reality, the odds are greater that the reality we’re living in is a simulation, not the “true” reality. If they build 1,000 simulations, the odds are 1/1,000 that we’re living in the “true” reality.
The Singularity
In 2014, Bostrom built off this hypothesis in his book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, in which he discussed the looming Singularity and how to mitigate world destruction. The Singularity, in Bostrom’s view, is the point where technological progress becomes so rapid—when humans build machines that build machines whose intelligence eventually surpasses human intelligence—that humans won’t be able to pull…
