NYTimes has a piece about the probability that we're living in a computer simulation.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Dr. Bostrom goes on to estimate that the chances of this actually being the case are 20/80, based on his gut feeling.
The JP has thought, and even written, about this idea before, but more from an experimental perspective. If we could trace the world back to the starting point of life and run simulations based on all sorts of different information, we could induce some of the starting conditions for life on the basis of the results of these models. We could also model political issues by modeling how the world would look at different times under different organizational policies.
It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.
Starcraft 4eva
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You're mining jdv for material now?!
Models are only as robust as the algorithms used in their construction.
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