Posthuman Blues

Simulated society may generate virtual culture

"Every character in the simulated world will need to eat to survive, and will be able to learn from their environment through trial and error - learning, for example, how to cultivate edible plants with water and sunlight. In addition, characters will be able to reproduce by mating with members the opposite sex and their offspring will inherited [sic] a random collection of their parents [sic] 'genetic' traits." (Via KurzweilAI.net.)





Here's a thought: The experiment forecasted above succeeds. So well, in fact, that more and more computational resources are put at its disposal. Flash forward 100 years -- a functional society, unaware that it's a simulation, has matured exponentiatingly from the first steps taken in 2005. While some scientists ponder shutting down the simulation, ethicists argue that the simulation's inhabitants are evidently self-aware and should be left alone. Meanwhile, a subculture of voyeuristic enthusiasts buoys interest in the simulated world by occasionally "hacking" it and disturbing the rules for reasons that seem downright Fortean to the indigenous population. Some devotees even scan their brains and migrate into the simulation, retaining some of the elevated status they wielded in "meatspace."

The result? Pretty much the world we have now. Maybe it's no accident we seem on the cusp of both technological transcendence and ecological holocaust; if we're being simulated, we might be an attempt by beings only slightly more advanced than ourselves to identify emergent threats to human existence.

But the real fun begins when the simulated society amasses the computational power to create its own simulations; this hierarchical model, taken to its logical extreme, argues that the chances of our being the "original" civilization are staggeringly low.