Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer simulation? Musk exhibited a surprising familiarity with this concept. “I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk said. Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations “indistinguishable from reality” was inevitable. The likelihood that we are living in “base reality,” he concluded, was just “one in billions.”

Source: The New Yorker Magazine

Date: February 28th, 2017

Link: http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-are-the-odds-we-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation

Discussion

1) It seems that the odds we are living in a computer simulation are almost 100%.  How do you feel about this?

2) Is this idea that we are living in a computer simulation just a convenient way to explain away events that just did not seem possible?  For instance, another article related to this one in the New Yorker used this argument to explain Trump winning the 2016 Presidential Election, the New England Patriots coming back from so far behind in the 2017 Superbowl final, and the 2017 Oscar Winning Movie flub.