The Cost of Simulation

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I worry that simulating consciousness is harder than we think, even though it should be in principle possible. I tend to punt on that question. The trick journal is sometimes halved by just saying nothing for a while. You usually get the subject to kind of say more than they wanted to say. But I'm not falling for it. Right. Well, okay. It might be that some of those reasons would require something more than the minimal level of resolution. And then you have most observers of our kind living in higher than the minimallevel of resolution simulations. Yeah, maybe,. I mean, I think that when we start doing these simulations, we'll start doing them at pretty low resolution

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization will ultimately last for millions of years, it could be considered surprising that we’ve found ourselves so early in history. Should we therefore predict that human civilization will probably disappear within a few thousand years? This “Doomsday Argument” shares a family resemblance to ideas used by many professional cosmologists to judge whether a model of the universe is natural or not. Philosopher Nick Bostrom is the world’s expert on these kinds of anthropic arguments. We talk through them, leading to the biggest doozy of them all: the idea that our perceived reality might be a computer simulation being run by enormously more powerful beings.

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Nick Bostrom received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the London School of Economics. He also has bachelor’s degrees in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and artificial intelligence from the University of Gothenburg, an M.A. in philosophy and physics from the University of Stockholm, and an M.Sc. in computational neuroscience from King’s College London. He is currently a Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. He is the author of Anthropic Bias: Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

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