Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who made most of his billions from being one of the founders of PayPal, attended the Code Conference 2016 in California this week and opined on in an interview about how we are really just all cyborgs. And, if that weren’t controversial enough, he stated that he really believes that we just may be products of an advanced civilization’s imagination and that reality here on Earth is little more than a video game type simulation for their entertainment.
With regard to our already being cyborgs, Musk warned that if we don’t upgrade ourselves soon we may risk being overtaken by advanced artificial intelligence and become so inferior to them that we also risk becoming their pets. Right now, though, Musk believes we are superhuman cyborgs who have powers undreamed of even a generation ago. We are, essentially, cyborgs because we exist both in physical reality and in online reality.
“You have a digital version of yourself,” he began, “a partial version of yourself online in the forms of your emails, your social media and all the things that you do. You can answer any question, you can video conference with anyone, anywhere. You can send messages to millions of people instantly. Just do incredible things.”
For now, in our humanoid cyborg form, we will remain or be overtaken by higher intelligence if we don’t act soon through injections of what is known as neural lace. When injected into the human brain, it will create an interface between humans and the advanced artificial intelligence that is likely to eventually take over. It will act in a way that may leave humans in a superior position to the AI.
One of the current darlings of Silicon Valley is the English philosopher Nick Bostrom. He postulates in his new book that we will soon be taken out as a race by advanced AI and there is also a huge risk of extraterrestrial intervention. Because of this, it is already likely that we are living in some sort of video game simulation and are at the whim of an advanced race. It is the major reason Musk has started OPEN AI so that benevolent artificial intelligence may be developed.
With regard to this all being a video game simulation, Musk said that, “Arguably, we should hope that it’s true because if civilization stops advancing that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization. So maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation, because otherwise we are going to create simulations indistinguishable from reality or civilization ceases to exist.”
He seems convinced that future generations, with their supercomputers, will create simulations of previous generations and the beings that populate those simulations will be conscious. Because of this postulation, Musk says,
“Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones.”
PHOTO CREDITS: The Associated Press / Flickr