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I think Elon is wrong, but for technical reasons, not philosophical ones. For one, we do not have photorealistic simulations for real-time games. We're not even
by Tossrock 10y ago
I think Elon is wrong, but for technical reasons, not philosophical ones. For one, we do not have photorealistic simulations for real-time games. We're not even close, frankly. Still-renders can pass the photorealism barrier, as in indistinguishable from a photograph, but even state-of-the-art triple A games are still facilely obvious simulations.
Most importantly, there hasn't been much progress in the past few years. Compare Battlefield 3 (2011) with Battlefield 4 (2013) with Battlefield 1 (2016, strangely enough), and you really won't see that much progress in realism. While you can get pretty screenshots, as soon as it's in motion, the distance from reality is obvious. What's missing is physics. Good physics simulations (ie fluid flow, soft-body, divisible materials, etc) is so computationally expensive that I doubt anything even approaching it will ever be realtime possible.
Why? Because the rate of improvement is slowing. Those paying attention know Moore's law is running out of steam (Intel recently had to insert an extra tick into their tick-tock model), and power draw / heat dissipation are ever more difficult to push. Arguments for the singularity / simulation all rely on an exponential curve being projected as far into the future as the speaker feels necessary, but in reality, there is no such thing as an exponential curve. All physical processes that experience exponential looking growth eventually slow down, forming a logistic curve, and it's looking like the growth curve for FLOPS is going to top out well before "photorealistic realtime simulation of the entire world available to every consumer".
- MatthaeusHarris 10y agoFrom inside a simulation, it's impossible to tell how fast the simulation is running because you have no external time reference. The visible universe as we know it could be running at a time dilation of of 10^100:1 and it would look exactly the same to us.
- Tossrock 10y agoTrue, but orthogonal to the argument. Elon's pro-simulation argument is fundamentally grounded in our reality ("video games have progressed a lot and there are lots of video game consoles, so eventually we could run the types of simulations postulated"), and my argument is refuting that ("video games will never be good enough to run those types of simulations")
- galistoca 10y agoYour argument is no different than people from the old times saying "the earth is flat". Of course that was the reality back then, but we've found out that's not the case. When talking about these things you should keep in mind whatever you say is just an opinion and a theory. Just like Newton's law was the reality until Einstein came along, the "reality" is nothing more than our interpretation of the world. That's why I think it's not a good idea to conclude someone is "wrong" for technical reasons. Our "technical" reality has been evolving and will keep evolving, so our reality today won't be the same as tomorrow's reality.
- chriswarbo 10y agoFor all we know, the graphics and physics engine running our universe could be a laughably mediocre imitation of what the external reality is like. That doesn't help the "ancestor simulation" idea, since that relies on advanced being wanting to simulate conditions encountered in their past (i.e. within the same universe). It does apply to the idea that we might be some kind of low-res game, running on a crummy hand(/tentacle)-held computer.