Tech billionaires are trying to develop a way to break us out of the Matrix

[MowCowWhoHow III]

Tech billionaires are trying to develop a way to break us out of the Matrix

If we're living in a computer simulation like in The Matrix, how would we know? It might be really hard to tell, according to philosophers and physicists.

It seems some leaders in Silicon Valley are taking the possibility seriously. At least two tech billionaires are recruiting scientists and funding research on a way to break us out of "the Matrix" that we may or may not be living inside of, according to a recent New Yorker profile of Sam Altman.

"Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer," Tad Friend wrote in the New Yorker piece. "Two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation."

Friend doesn't name any names, so we can only speculate as to who might be funding a secret computer simulation research lab.

https://mic.com/articles/156038/tech-billionaires-are-trying-to-develop-a-way-to-break-us-out-of-the-matrix#.7JUPdTZkA

[scscholar]

1. Chances are we're living in a simulation...

since one real world could have millions of simulations running thus making the chance of being in the real world less than one in a million.

[Renew Deal]

2. Thanks. But I need helping out of the Truman show.

[icymist]

3. I know I'm not in the Matrix because, if I was the food would be much better!

That's all.

[Wounded Bear]

4. No way....the color is different inside the Matrix vs out...

[Oneironaut]

5. Isn't "breaking out of a simulation" a 100% spurious concept?

That would make as much sense as a notepad file jumping out of your screen and walking around. If we're part of a simulation, then we're just code. There's nothing to "break out of." If anything, we might glitch it out so horribly that the simulation crashes, this ending the universe.

Also, how can you be sure that breaking out of the current simulation isn't part of another simulation?

[Glassunion]

6. Reminds me of this fellow...

[Oneironaut]

7. Ping! Ping! Ping! Can I help you? Lol

On every computer I had, I always prefered the dog to the paperclip.

[longship]

14. NPR's "Wait Wait" covered Clippy.

It's a very funny bit. And it has Paula Poundstone!

Here:

[Buckeye_Democrat]

15. I saw Bill Gates on a TV "game show" a long time ago.

I don't know if there's a video of it on the internet somewhere, but he did quite poorly trying to answer trivia questions about computers and computer software! I did much better than him at the time (at home watching the TV), and I only took about half a dozen computer programming courses in college!

I later heard the backstory about him buying MS-DOS from someone else, making a monopolistic software deal with IBM when they came out with PCs (since IBM assumed the big money was in hardware), etc.

Gates' father was a LAWYER. Great wealth in this country is less often the result of talent and more often the result of how contracts were written.

EDIT: Maybe this is what I saw on TV? I'm not sure.

[longship]

16. Thanks. I am not a big fan of Microsoft.

I was working in IT for quite some number of years. My later expertise was Linux, which brought fame and fortune.

[haele]

8. Rumsfeld and NWO/Carslyle folks - "We create our reality..."

In many ways, we do live in a simulated society.
Our social and information interaction is monitored and controlled. While it's not exactly like "The Matrix", there is a lot of fabrication and illusion to how we learn and function. Where the danger to informed individual action and other "free will" concepts (in which we can choose to live in a particular environment) is that there is an increasing chance that the basis for the reality you think you're choosing comes from Disney or some other group of "fellow traveler" organizations who have already monetized your life; wanting to make a profit off you rather than a natural social and environmental evolution.

If you need to buy your lifestyle, then it's a created lifestyle, and you have chosen to live in a simulation. While it may be easier to live such a life, you as a person only are worth the amount of consumption you can purchase to those who provide you with the simulation.

Most people don't understand that to live in a technologically driven world, you give up the rights and responsibilities of citizenship commiserate to the amount you are owned by technology.
The trick to knowing what's real and what's not is understanding the ticket you bought to ride the corporate train, and how often you're allowed to get on and off to be "yourself" rather than just be a passenger that is kicked off as soon as the operators decide the ride is over.

And don't think that being a hippie or "alternative" makes a difference. Anything that's "on the grid" is a form of controlled simulation.

It's an "opportunity cost". I know how to survive if all my technology fails, because I have learned how to adapt make do in the physical world - with nothing but chipped flint if necessary. I freely choose to make my life easier as I get older, using technology and slowly sinking into the Matrix where I'm owned. Because I'm tired. But if I have to, I can survive without it, and have enough real knowledge of over 1000 years of engineering to teach others if need be.

Haele

[Warren DeMontague]

9. 400 micrograms or so of d-lysergic acid diethylamide, Elon.

That'll break you out right quick.

[farmbo]

10. So some super intelligent beings have coded...

... us all into an artificial reality; and what genius creation did they script? Kochs, Adelson, Murdock, Bill Gates and the Silicon Valley crowd are our Billionaire Overlords... and the rest of us are workaday slobs.

I'God... just shoot me now.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

11. Some theoretical physicists are leaning that way. (Video)

I've personally pondered for many years how "real" stuff, in the realm of energy and space-time that can be measured, obeys laws that are mathematical and NOT tangible. If you ponder it deeply, one interpretation is that there's underlying zero-energy information that guides everything else.

The speed limit of light applies to anything with mass/energy. If there's such a "thing" as zero-energy information, it doesn't have to obey such a speed limit. Quantum entanglement and "spooky action at a distance" has been observed. Is there instantaneous information transfer happening, perhaps with temporary local energy "borrowing" (Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) producing the effects?

Or maybe the concept of the quantum wave function already implies this idea? With only a bachelor's degree, I know just enough to be dangerous!

[The_Casual_Observer]

12. If that were the case it's a hell of a lot better simulation

Than any of the crude cheesy games and simulations that I've ever seen.

[CBGLuthier]

13. World on a Wire. Beat the Matrix by 20 years with the same concept.

Plus, thanks to the direction of the brilliant Rainer Werner Fassbinder it also has lots of shirtless beefcake men, if you like that sort of thing.

[tandem5]

17. What's really going to bake your noodle later on is...

You are the only one being simulated.