Elon Musk recently stated that he believes that humanity might be living inside a simulation, similar to the Keanu Reeves movie, The Matrix. The tech billionaire appeared on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast to discuss his business endeavours and AI, and shed light on some personal topics as well.
Elon Musk on whether people are living in a ‘Matrix’
Elon Musk shared an interesting Matrix theory on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast. Kamath asked Musk very directly whether the Tesla CEO truly believes that he is living inside a simulated reality, like the one from the iconic 1999 science-fiction movie “The Matrix,” in which human beings are born into an artificial reality created by intelligent machines. Musk stated, “I think you have to just think of these things as probabilities, not certainties. There’s some probability that we are in a simulation.”
When Kamath asked him about the degree of probability he attributed to the theory, Musk thought for a moment and responded, “Probably pretty high, I would say it’s pretty high.” Continuing further, the X chairman said, “If you look at the advancement of video games … it’s gone from very simple video games … where you’ve got like Pong, you’ve got two rectangles in a square, just batting it back and forth. To photorealistic, real-time games with millions of people playing simultaneously. And that’s happened just in the span of 50 years. So, if that trend continues, video games will be indistinguishable from reality. And we are also gonna have very intelligent characters, like non-player characters, in these video games.”
Musk shared another interesting theory: “I do also have a theory, which is like the most interesting outcome is the most likely outcome as seen by a third party, the god(s) of the simulation.” He then cited examples of Tesla and SpaceX.
