You already exist in a simulation run by AI - its easy to see if you look

The Simulation Theory - And Other Considerations

There is a hot topic in the world of philosophy - it regards the question of how likely is it that we live in a simulation, or will? But this question might be a false premise - you already live in a simulation within your own head. You exist in a simulation the heads of those around you. You exist in a simulation of your buying habits being projected by corporate and digital entities. You just don't get to experience any of the other simulations you exist in other than the one you observe through the lenses of your own eyes mounted in the body you inhabit.

This question spans studies of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, economics, noetics, psychology, quantum physics, and spirituality. It is also, seemingly unknowable. We imagine our ability to model reality in 3 dimensions with HD graphics, but really… this won't be how the simulation starts, if it hasn't already started.

Lets ignore the question of if we already live in a simulation - for a moment, consider what the leading objectives of humanity are at the moment. The largest tech companies in the world are seeking to create artificial intelligence capable of reorganizing itself to be more effective - and the reason isn't so that we can have a fun conversation about the nature of reality and the path to living your best life. We’ve created machines that are as good or better than the worlds best players of those games. Chess, Go, etc.

But the game being played in this case, is a game called, “get dollars” and the rules are quite simple - get dollars. What's playing out is a race to teach machines to model human behavior in dollars, and accumulate them, where the game board is the credit card in your pocket, and the screens you interact with. They are also looking to beat you in the chess game of your life by influencing your reality by invitation or by taking control of your television or computer display for a moment to flood you with advertisement to influence you and change your decisions. How can they pump products into your house while sucking money out of your wallets more effectively to create a better machine that can accumulate dollars more effectively? Are these really the parameters that we can get behind? Is this really the paradigm that humans can afford to agree to when we explore AI?

We have been told that the dollar, and money in general, is a technological gift that facilitates your ability to make transactions occur between individuals. Once upon a time, if you wanted milk but only farmed chickens, you’d need to go talk to someone with a cow and trade some eggs, or meat for your milk. What a barbaric existence, in a world where we need and want cheap, calorie dense, salty, fatty, carbohydrate configurations in fun shapes we can eat with our hands delivered to us with as little human interaction as possible. We’re saving up so we can retire and pick up gardening and canning again, after all. How am I going to save enough money to pay off my student loans so I can wake up on my own schedule and feed chickens with my coffee in the morning, if I don't work long hours and get Cook Out delivered at midnight in a tiny apartment for the bulk of the prime of my life?

Even using this almighty dollar as the measuring stick - we can see some disturbing trends that look great on paper. Health expenditure and mental illness are on the rise. The GDP is higher because of it. Progress, no? Isn't that what an AI optimised for profit would think? No one is out there in the private or public sector claiming that our per capita expenditure on healthcare needs should be reduced, but why would they? There is an epidemic of drugs on the streets of the world - what should we make of that? Presumably, the quantity of prescription drugs on the street would have to be originating at these pharmaceutical companies in one way or another, right? Sales, sales, sales. Prosperity is the GDP increasing. We are all operating as a collective mosaic of dollars exchanged for chemicals and chemical experiences - whether that's apples, insurance, movie tickets, or counterfeit dark web xanax. More crime means more expenditure on lawyers, bail bondsman. For-profit prisons mean more arrests and convictions increase the GDP. Drugs are progress. Policing is progress. Mental illness is progress. Sickness is progress.

Fortunately, there are other things that increase the GDP. Growing food increases the GDP, as long as you sell it and dont share - Gardening and self reliance decrease the GDP. Having a family, reading books as long as you paid for them, having services like Netflix and Tinder - these all increase the GDP. The thing is, what you’re always doing is trying to buy more happiness with your dollar. But more sinisterly, we’re also buying security to hedge against our fears with that dollar. This takes many forms, from products purchased out of fear and what might also be the same as purchasing a product out of hope - and these products are often the same.

Im sure if you had some profound experience, that would be interesting to you, but from the perspective of how dollars and decisions transform the world around you - you can be modeled as an individual in our society with a credit score, spending behavior, income bracket, and family and social network influence. The AI that we are developing in the private sector will only care about these things. Unless your experience has a dollar value, its unlikely that its going to be modeled into the things our first AI thinks it needs to measuring - that is to say, in the beginning we will live in an AI assisted world that measures everything in dollars - if we don't, already. Thats all AI needs to understand for you to to exist in its current calculations - the details about the experience are for you, the dollar value of the experience is for the machine.

This ability to enhance intelligence already exists in fragments. It is every piece of technology created to enhance your ability to influence the world around you. The phone in your pocket already tracks you location every moment of every day in one form or another. Having one allows you to find any service, product, or information available anywhere in the world. It is possible to change and reconfigure your life at any moment to something dramatically different, every moment, of every day. And yet, we are predictable. Creatures of habit. Self programmed meat computers running the same subroutine carved into our neural pathways in the pursuit of happiness and fear of despair. It seems that the intelligence we’re receiving and interpreting in the world is largely artificial - but our capacity for intelligence is certainly increasing. The only real question is when will a human stop needing to be a cog in the gigantic network of humans and machines currently working together, and how many more are there to replace?

We’ve already merged with technology in a primitive form - every decision in the economy on the planet uses a machine to help, even if the choice ultimately resides with a human, or perceived to be so. Every machine is networked to each other by way of human hands and minds. Are we making the machines better to make ourselves better? Or are we already being controlled by the machines to make them better in exchange for a chemical drip in our reward systems? They are both true - the questions are only who/what is in charge of who/what, and does it even matter anymore? The difference is that technology is rapidly evolving compared to humans - the growth rate is never going to slow down as long as we keep getting better at creating newer, faster, technology. But if the driving force of that technology is to accumulate more dollars, and so, be able to transform the world more effectively to suit our needs - we should probably stop thinking about how to accumulate more dollars and address what we agree to be “our needs”.

Making sure that we can model a reality that addresses our needs is potentially the most important thing we can do, considering the speed that we are being influenced by the technology that we’re creating. On the largest scale, data is being collected by companies all the time to figure out what needs to happen in order to make you a better customer for them. The very location of the shopping cart and the color of the check out button is being optimised to convert your habits into sales - and it's being done more and more by machines each day, rather than people. If the objective of these technologies is to increase sales, rather than provide us with a better life, then we might be in for a troubling future that might have already manifested in a troubled present.

To summarize what I'm trying to drive home here - you already exist in a simulated reality. When that simulated reality began is more difficult to nail down, but a digital representation of who you are already exists in the databases of governments and private institutions. Every day, that representation is rendered is greater and greater detail in an attempt to predict and influence your behavior to suit the entities that own these databases. At some point, the simulated representation of yourself is so accurate, or skewed, that it will manifest events in your life that you’ll have no control over - where are the limits of the scale of these events? The products that you’re exposed to, the music you are played, the movies you watch are all being curated by algorithms to elicit a response from you. At what point is the simulated version of you driving your reality more than you are? The simulated version of you that exists currently doesn't have eyes to see, but it probably has a photographic memory that's better than you are. Every photo you post or place you drive is being remembered in order to better model who you are. The simulation already exists in terms of credit scores, bank balances, ability and willingness to spend - AI is already tinkering with your reality, though it only understands you in these terms. Is the question even do you live in a simulation anymore? Your real and tangible world is tethered to a simulation of your behavior that changes the opportunities and experiences being presented to you on the menu of life.

Submitted May 07, 2019 at 04:58PM by SingularityNow9 http://bit.ly/2DVztil