Hey, this is Paris. I hope you enjoyed the Data Vampire series that we did back in October. It's had a fantastic response. And for that series, I spoke to a bunch of experts. And now we're releasing the full-length versions of those interviews for our supporters over on Patreon.com. And I wanted to give you a preview of what those interviews sound like. So you can consider whether to go to patreon.com slash techwon'save us, become a supporter yourself, so you can learn even more about the important topics that we dug into in that special series. So enjoy this clip from my interview with Emile Torres. So we've talked about a lot of aspects of this stuff in the past, of course, and you've written about much more. For this series in particular, I'm interested in learning a bit more about Nick Bostrom's simulation theory and like where that comes from and how he formulated it.
SPEAKER_00So I think that first of all, it's important to distinguish between what is called the simulation hypothesis and the simulation argument. So there was a paper that was published, I believe, in 2003 by Nick Bostrom that introduced the simulation argument. And the simulation hypothesis is a part of that argument. And the argument essentially says that there are at least one of the three following propositions must be true. Either our species goes extinct probably in the relative near future before we create a post-human civilization. Or it's the case that any post-human civilization is for some reason very unlikely to run simulations of its past, which are sometimes called ancestor simulations. The third disjunct is that we almost certainly live in a computer simulation right now. And the reason for that third disjunct is okay, if we don't go extinct, we survive into the future, we do build this post-human civilization, and there isn't some moral or legal or some other restriction that prevents our future post-human descendants from running these ancestor simulations, then it's very likely that they will run a huge number of them. Consequently, the number of simulated people in the universe could be far greater than the number of non-simulated people. That leads to another question, which is how do we know that we are not in a simulation right now? Maybe you could say, well, we look around and things just look very real. And Bostrom and others would say, well, actually, these ancestor simulations that our post-human descendants will be running, they will be really high resolution. People in these simulations will not be able to tell that they're in a simulation. The simulated world will be indistinguishable from true reality.
SPEAKER_01They'll have really good uh graphics processing units in the future.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah. The GPUs will be fantastic. I mean, I mean, maybe, maybe our post-human descendants will you know start to colonize space and they will have figured out how to convert matter that they come across in the universe into a material, a hypothetical material called computronium. And so that is matter that is optimized to run computations. So to just be like really, really efficient computers in the future that can then run these massive simulations, a very large number of these massive simulations that are more or less indistinguishable from reality and full of these simulated beings exactly like us, because again, they'd be simulating our past. So if there's no way to sort of empirically determine, or we there's no known way at this point to empirically determine whether or not we are in a computer simulation right now, what do you do? Well, then he says what we ought to do is use the principle of indifference, which just says that if you have no extra information, you should just consider that you're just an average entity in the set. So if you do that, and you remember that there might be way more simulated beings than actual real beings, it follows that we're much more likely to be one of the simulated beings right now than one of the real beings. This is the simulation argument, those three disjuncts. And the simulation hypothesis has to do with that third disjunct, extrapolating uh technological progress into the future and then thinking about what the implications to that are, in particular, that we will probably run a very large number of these ancestor simulations, meaning that the population of simulated beings is much greater than the population of non simulated beings, apply the principle of indifference, and you get the conclusion that I just mentioned.
SPEAKER_01If you found that clip intriguing, go to patreon.comslash techwon'save us, where you can become a supporter, support the work that goes into making the show, and get the full length version of that interview. Thanks so much.