Elon Musk is the guy behind SpaceX, PayPal, Tesla Motors, among other achievements. At the annual Recode Code Conference, he decided to let us in on his thoughts behind the idea of our lives being nothing more but a video game. The below video takes place during some sort of Q&A session that the conference had. Nobody seemed prepared for how serious of an answer Elon was going to give the question, but by the end of the video everyone else is amazed.
The basis of his argument is that video games have evolved dramatically from their roots in Pong 40 years ago. Now we have photo-realistic video games with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s only looking up with virtual reality and augmented reality becoming a mainstream piece of technology.
Assuming some sort of continuous rate of improvement, it’s inevitable that video games will one day become “indistinguishable” with reality. “There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality,” he says.
“If civilization stops advancing, that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization. So maybe we should be hopeful this is a simulation, because otherwise we are going to create simulations indistinguishable from reality or civilization ceases to exist. We’re unlikely to go into some multi million-year stasis.”
Other theories by Musk included humanity arriving on Mars by 2025. He stated that the government on Mars would be a direct democracy, in order to reduce the possibility for political corruption. Also with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, Musk suggests that we inject neural lace into our brains that allows humans to advance at an equal rate with machines.
