Name: Is life a video game? | Elon Musk | Code Conference 2016
Uploaded: 2026-02-09T03:26:51.000Z
Duration: 3 min 44 s
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Adverbs of manner

There's sort of a philosophic concept that a sufficiently advanced civilization will be able to create simulation.

I've had so many simulation discussions, it's crazy.

Because in fact, it got to the point where basically every conversation was the AI simulation conversation.

And my brother and I finally agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub.

So the idea is, right, any sufficiently advanced civilization could create a simulation that's like, our existence.

And so the theory follows that maybe we're in the simulation.

So much so it had to be banned from a hot tub?

I think here's, in my mind, like the strongest argument for us being in a simulation, probably being in a simulation, I think is the following.

That 40 years ago we had Pong, like two rectangles and a dot.

Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously.

And soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just instinguishable.

Even if that rate of advancement drops by 1,000 from what it is right now, then you just say, okay, well, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and

those games could be played on any set top box or on a PC or whatever, and

there would probably be billions of such computers or set top boxes.

It would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.

Is the answer yes, the argument is probably.

So the assumption then is that somebody beat us to it and this is a game.

No, there's a one in billions chance that this is base reality.

That seems to be clearly what it suggests.

And actually, arguably we should hope that that's true, because otherwise, if civilization stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization.

So maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation, because otherwise.

Well, otherwise, either we're going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist.