Nick Bostrom on the Simulation Argument

This interview was conduced late 2012 at the offices of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford University at around the time of the Winter Intelligence conference.

The simulation argument is continuing to attract a great deal of attention. I regret that I cannot usually respond to individual queries about the argument.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

Links

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

https://simulation-argument.com/simulation