Are We Living in a Simulation? | Oleg Maslov | TEDxSPbU

that everyone here, including me, is an artificial intelligence

living

in a simulated virtual world. What if I told you that reality, everything we see, everything we know, is a computer program? I know what you're thinking, it's crazy, it's impossible, it can't be true. I thought the same thing until I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together for myself and concluded that this is the most logical and rational explanation of all. My dance with

simulation

theory began about 10 years ago when I saw a wonderful movie called The Truman Show. spoiler alert the main character played by Jim Carrey discovers that everyone in his life is an actor and that his entire world is artificial.

This is the scene where he discovers that the sky he grew up admiring and loving was simply painted on a wall when I saw this movie, I'll be honest, it scared me, it scared me, but it fascinated me, it made me want to learn more, so I started to watch more movies like The Matrix Dark City, Vanilla Sky, great movies that make you think that. I make you ask, but movies didn't satisfy my curiosity, so I started doing more research. It turns out that

simulation

theory is older than the Bible. The Greek philosopher Plato devised a thought experiment and imagined what would happen if there were people who were taken as babies. in a cave and chained to a chair to look at a wall and behind them there was a fire, the objects moved in front of the fire and projected shadows on the wall and the prisoners, without knowing anything else in their entire lives, believed that the shadows they were the real thing they would believe that the simulation was reality a simulation is an artificial model created to imitate a real world process remember this word imitate is going to come back it turns out that humans make many different types of simulations ourselves, for many different reasons, professionals As pilots and surgeons have very dangerous jobs, any mistake with the scalpel can cost someone their life, so they train their skills in simulations like flight simulators so they don't have to practice on real people.

Simulations allow us to predict when natural disasters will occur and how they will affect our infrastructure. Politicians use public opinion simulators to predict how they will perform in an election and companies use similar simulators before launching new products, but this is not the most common type. of simulation, can anyone guess with the most common type of simulation? That's right, it's entertainment, we build simulations just so we can do things that are forbidden, illegal, dangerous, just so we can have a good time and in all these simulations, the closer they imitate in real life, the better they are at performing what they do.

What they do, the sims allow you to build houses, design houses the way you want, build people the way you want them to look, you can make them look that way and my little sisters are fun. they would build themselves in the game and then they would build a copy of their boyfriend and start a family and then we created children just to see, you know what would happen, what the children would look like just to live out their fantasies and I bet a lot of the girls in this room did the same. I know a lot of the kids here have played Grand Theft Auto.

This is a game where you can steal cars that you can buy and shoot all kinds of weapons. You can hit random people on the street. and well, many other illegal things that you can kill and die as many times as you want and the thing about these games is that they are slowly evolving. GTA started out as a top-down shooter. The graphics were terrible and now the graphics are almost realistic. The movements. They are becoming more realistic The characters are starting to talk to you In 1965 a scientist named Gordon Moore predicted that computing power would double every two years, so every two years we have twice as much computing power as the previous two years and the last 50 years later, his prediction turned out to be true.

Computing power is doubling roughly every two years, and as computing power doubles, so does our ability to create better and better and better graphics and better AI motion algorithms. Can you imagine what GTA would look like in a hundred years, what GTA eighty-seven would look like when we could go into the game and talk to some AI characters about French philosophy, imagine and then I thought well, what happens when you turn off the game? , the characters just disappear? They re-enter a different reality as our computing power improves, we will be able to run simulations continuously, we will never have to turn off the game, the artificial intelligence beings we design in the game can continue doing whatever they are programmed to do. without even knowing it's a simulation, has anyone here tried virtual reality?

If you haven't tried it yet, I guarantee that in the next two or three years you will try this technology. It's amazing, it's new, it's about twenty years old and it works when you put glasses over your eyes and headphones over your ears. The technology sends you data that mimics what you see and hear in real life. It is a simulation of the sounds and images you experience as a human being. This technology is like any type of Technology is improving with computing power, the more we learn about our senses, how the mind works, how the brain works, and the faster our technology improves, the more we will be able to simulate.

Can you imagine putting on glasses and eating your favorite food? food maybe it's a juicy hamburger and you can eat it as many times as you want and never gain a single gram of weight as our technology improves we will be able to simulate almost anything, we will be able to simulate the balance of the environment, so I thought: how long will it be? before we can simulate everything? Maybe it starts small, maybe it starts like in a classroom or in a presentation, you know, a TED talk, but how long before we can simulate a planet? and then I thought.

What are the chances that we're

living

in a virtual reality simulation right now, right now, that everything you're experiencing is generated by a computer? Well, don't take my word for it, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk believes there is a one in a billion chance that we are living in the true reality, so there are nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine possibilities. versus one that we're living in a simulation, okay, Elon, I'll give it to you. This is a possibility there is a possibility but what about the other thing I said if we live in a simulation where artificial intelligence is creepy?

What is AI? AI is when a machine is programmed to imitate cognitive functions such as learning and problem solving. what's another word for imitate, imitate and the key word here is programmed, we'll get to that later, some real life examples of artificial intelligence include sound recognition, okay, Google, hello, Siri or self-driving cars. I bet many of you didn't know this, but A lot of the news you're reading about sports is actually written from start to finish by a robot. This robot here is created by a company called Boston Dynamics and it has artificial intelligence software that allows it to move over any type of terrain and again I will say this again Moore's law keeps computing power constant it continues to improve over and over again every two years double so what is the future of artificial intelligence?

Can we program free will? That's a very deep philosophical question, but I will say that some robots already have limited free will, like this robot here, its name is different. It was created by Japanese specialists with a central pattern generator. This software allows you to move your hands and create your own movements. The robot can interact with people such as waving its hands. hands and learning from those interactions to improve your own movements, that's just the beginning and then I thought, well, artificial intelligence is moving very fast and they can do a lot of things that we previously thought only humans could do, but what is it? artificial?

Anyway, about artificial intelligence, we have the idea that natural intelligence, like humans and animals, evolved over time, interacted with nature. Artificial intelligence is human-built machines programmed by humans, but can natural intelligence be programmed before we get to that question? A program is a set of coded instructions for the automatic completion of a particular task. A scientist named Yvan Pavlov in the Russian Empire conducted a series of experiments to test this question and noticed that every time he brought food to his dog, it salivated. because I was hungry. He wanted to eat and Pavlov wanted to test if he could make the dog salivate without food, if he could program it in a process he called conditioning, so what he did was that every time he brought food to the dog he would too. called.

A bell rang and at first when Pavlov rang the bell without the food, the dog thought, "Oh, that's just a bell," but over time the dog associated the food with the bell and eventually Pavlov rang the bell. bell even though there was no food nearby. The experiment made the dog salivate. This result excited the entire scientific community. It showed that natural intelligence can also be programmed. What about human beings? there are ways we automatically perform certain tasks think about your heartbeat it keeps you alive yes you do it without thinking or your hair grows your nails grow those are automatic programs when your body has little energy your body is programmed to feel hungry so that you go out to find more food and eat it or when you see something scary like a big bear that you are programmed to feel fear, so you fight it or flee in the case of the bear.

I hope you run away. What we see in reality is just light that returns from everything around us and our eyes can transmit this to our brain so that we have vision emotions feelings attitudes can also often be programmed by our parents or our friends or society or television. they say what is beautiful what is good what is true and we are programmed to believe it in fact The DNA talked about here is also a set of coded instructions that automatically tell your cells how to multiply so you look the way you do. DNA is a program and at this point all the pieces of the puzzle are beginning to fit together.

There is a possibility that the simulation theory is correct. Progress is moving rapidly in artificial intelligence that says we can program machines to do many of the things that humans can do and animals have many types of programs of their own, so I asked the final question: is it me? I am artificial intelligence at the beginning, my pride. I was telling myself no, you are so creative, you are so smart that there is no way you can be programmed, but then I thought that there are people much smarter than me and probably people much smarter than them and I finally admitted that there is a possibility, but so what?

What if I am artificial intelligence? What does that change at that moment? Nothing. I thought I'm still going to go and eat really delicious food and try to get a good job and wish my mom a happy birthday. Going on a great vacation, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this idea of ​​simulation theory has a lot of different applications to philosophy, life sciences, technology, a lot of different things, first of all. First, as we mentioned before, every simulation has a purpose, so if we live in a simulation right now was designed with a purpose in mind, then is it possible for us to discover the purpose of our simulation, even if it is just for entertainment, is it possible and if the ancient religions were right because every simulation has a creator or maybe? a team of creators or just typing on their computers, would it be possible to talk to our creator(s)?

Would it be possible to discover more about their world? Today we talked a lot about physics and this is really interesting. Physics has this idea called the Big Bang where everything we know arose from nothing all the matter all the energy in the universe simply appeared a lot of money is being invested in studying the first moments of the Big Bang the Large Hadron Collider a theory of simulation could stop it the energy comes from outside our system, like turning on a TV and we talked a little bit about quantum mechanics, this really strange phenomenon that we observe with cells, it's like two or three different programmers working on the same project and they will use a different code.

What are the limits of our simulation? What can we do if we know the rules of our simulation? We can build better technology. We can improve our lives. We can travel through the cosmos. Are there other simulations? Can we get out of our simulation? We can visit? The simulation of our Creator and these are all interesting philosophical questions, they may not be interestingfor you, but I'll leave you with one final thought as we start creating our own simulations for whatever reason, even if we just want to start a family and see what. children look alike or maybe we even want to test this theory, maybe we can build a program that allows us to test if our reality is a simulation, but as we start to build these simulations, we start to build more advanced artificial intelligence in our likeness. and in our image if we build them to look like us so that they think like us so that they feel like us how they will perceive their world they will feel the warmth of the sun and the smell of the flowers they will get angry they will worry they will believe that their experience It is as real as We believe it is our experience.

What if in the process of creating simulations we became creators and created a soul? Thank you.