
Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has a less ordinary vision of what reality really is.
In a recent interview, billionaire tech entrepreneur and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that the human race is ‘probably’ living in a simulated computer game we can’t tell apart from the physical reality.
He added that chances that humans are not currently living in such reality are pretty low: “one in a billion.” He also believes that video games may soon become so complex that we won’t be able to tell them from real life.
At the Code Conference, he brought more arguments to his odd theory. He noted that four decades ago we had 2-D video games such as Pong. Fastforward 40 years later, we have virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3-D simulations played simultaneously by millions of people worldwide.
He said that at the current pace of technological progress we would develop video games that are plainly “indistinguishable’ from reality. Musk added that this outcome is very likely even if the speed of technological progress falls by 1,000. He also said that there would be billions of these simulations out there.
‘It would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in ‘base reality’ is one in billions’,
Musk said.
He also thinks that the only thing that may stop this scenario from becoming reality is a cataclysmic event which could stop ‘civilization.’ In past interviews, he has warned about an AI apocalypse or a World War III.
The tech visionary’s obsession with AI was evident in the latest interview as well. Musk recommends humans to find new ways to artificially enhance their brain power if they don’t want to become intelligent machines’ pets.
He remarked that without an augmented brain humans would be left behind so much in intelligence by robots that they could be used by the latter as their home pets.
”I don’t love the idea of being a house cat,”
he added.
Among his most recent musings there was also the idea that humans could finally land on Mars by 2025. And he said that his own spaceflight company, SpaceX, will make it happen. The idea is to improve the Flying Dragon 2 rocket to safely carry humans to the Red Planet. The journey should not last more than 18 months.
Musk promised to start sending rockets to Mars in 2018. From that point on, his company would beam other unmanned cargos to Mars every 26 months. In 2024, SpaceX should be ready to send the first manned mission to the Red Planet, according to Musk.
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