How to Hire a Good, Humane Computer Programmer

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Are we living in a video game? If so, the joke is on us, says cognitive scientist Joscha Bach. When people debate the possibility of human existence as a simulation, it's predominantly assumed that we are the players. Our overlord simulators are watching us, right? Well, that doesn't seem to gel with the amount of detail present in our world and the observable universe beyond. Why did our cosmic creators bother to code trillions of galaxies into the viewfinders of our telescopes? The Higgs boson, for example, is not necessary for our existence, so who would have the time to add such irrelevant frills just for our amusement (maybe the simulators had a really great intern that summer)? The answer? It's not made for us. According to Bach, if this is a simulation it's unlikely that we are the main attraction and much more realistic that the simulators wanted to make a model of a universe to explore hypothetical physics. That tiny blue dot with primates mixing concrete all over the surface? "We are just a random side effect or an artifact of the fact that evolution is possible in this universe," says Bach.

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JOSCHA BACH

Dr. Joscha Bach (MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) is an AI researcher who works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He is founder of the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the interactions of emotion, motivation, and cognition of situated agents. Bach’s mission to build a model of the mind is the bedrock research in the creation of Strong AI, i.e. cognition on par with that of a human being. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Joscha Bach: Could we be living in a simulation? I think that is related first of all to the question of what we mean by a simulation. If the question is, “Could we be living inside of a computer program?” then my answer would be: of course, yes.

Because the only thing that we get with some certainty from the outside world is information. And the only thing that we find with certainty in this information is regularity. And for a system to produce regularity in information—that is, discernible differences that change in a way that is somewhat not random and somewhat predictable—for this, it needs to compute. So it’s necessary and sufficient for the universe—whatever else it does—that it computes. And we cannot really know what else it does.

So in my view it’s necessary and sufficient that the universe is some kind of computer in a pretty literal sense, by the way we define computers and computer science. It doesn’t mean that we know what kind of computational class this system is in and there is, I think, a lot of contest and ideas in physics about what kind of computational class the universe really is and what capabilities it has. What it can compute and what it cannot compute. But still, it’s computational in some sense.

The question of whether we are living in a simulation is more related to something more narrow, that is: is this computer program that we’re living in intentionally created, or is it just a natural occurrence? And of course we cannot really know this because no feature in the world clearly points at this thing being a simulation in this sense. I don’t see anything that would convince me that we are in a simulation. But if it is one, I don’t think it’s for our benefit. I don’t think that all these galaxies and stars and all the intricate elementary particle structures that we can observe in some sense—they are not necessary for our experience as primates on the planetary surface. It would be needed to be painted on the telescopes and microscopes by the simulator. So I don’t think that these are smokes and mirrors when we look into the sky and we see these bazillions of galaxies.

I do think that if this is a simulation then they would be an important feature of the simulation, which means the simulation is not there to create us. The simulation is probably there to explore some aspects of hypothetical physics, and we are just a random side effect or an artifact of the fact that evolution is possible in this universe, so we could emerge in it.

I think it’s very unlikely that we are in a simulation, because ...

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