But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

Like most people who enjoy dark rooms and Sleep’s Jerusalem, I dig the simulation argument. It is, as far as I can tell, the most reasonable scientific proposition no one completely believes. I have yet to encounter anyone who totally buys it; even the man most responsible for its proliferation places the likelihood of its validity at roughly 20 percent. But even a one-in-five chance presents the potential for a paradigm shift greater than every other historical shift combined. It would place the Copernican Revolution on a par with the invention of Velcro. The man to whom I refer is existential Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, currently directing the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. He’s relatively young (born in ’73), balding, and slightly nervous that the human race will be annihilated by robots. Yet it is his simulation hypothesis (building off the earlier work of Austrian roboticist Hans Moravec) that really moves the stoner needle.