Originally Posted by Wolf359
Originally Posted by Jackson_Slugger
Originally Posted by Wolf359
Originally Posted by Jackson_Slugger
He's not moving. As I've said elsewhere: he's just a simulation whose future ancestors just want to see what an a-hole he was...
Yeah, except we're not in a simulation if you believe in the fractional quantum hall effect.
https://www.popsci.com/quantum-hall-computer-simulation/
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1701758
It doesn't matter what I believe, it only matters what Elon believes...
Thanks for the links though...
Oh yeah, let me know what you think about the factional quantum hall effect. I think a Nobel prize was issued for its discovery back in 1998.
I'll get back to you on that one!
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I've read that Elon's belief in it springs from watching how advanced video games have become and he thinks that it's inevitable that it would advance to such a stage that you wouldn't be able to distinguish between a simulation or not.
But I don't think he's factored in built in limitations to certain things. We still don't have AI like it was predicted in the past but we're getting closer. Fusion power is still 20 years away like it's been for several decades. Star Trek thought we'd be traveling to the stars in the 90's. Commercial plane travel is subsonic now as supersonic doesn't make financial sense. And the fractional quantum hall effect says that it and many other things can't be simulated because once you get beyond a few hundred particles, you would need more matter than in all the universe to build a computer that could calculate/simulate it. And real life is made up of way more than a few hundred particles. Each additional particle increases the difficulty exponentially.
I think you caught my irony. It's one of the key reasons I mistrust Musk and some of the "genius"-idolatry misplaced. There are multiple examples of Musk "not getting it" and acting like a self-promoting charlatan that doesn't process nonlinear thinking well and showing he may have more in common with the "genius" of Barnum and Bailey than the mentioned Edison or Tesla. I think that while it would be feasible for a future civilian to create a Matrix of sims to study, I think even over and above the science-based criticism of us being in one is the ethical implications. Would our future ancestors create sentient, self-aware beings (at least to a point) capable of feeling immense emotional and physical pain. Video game characters do not necessitate sentience. I doubt any evolved civiliazation would even allow it.
If they did they would simply be creating something akin to the "Hosts" in
Westworld, creating suffering for entertainment. But even a cursory reading of Wikipedia and other articles I've read indicate that the Sim Hypothesis is assumptive rather than evidence based, as in "they can do it so they must have". It's interesting, but we could speculate about a lot of things such as parallel universes, etc. because they're actually more likely...
Other examples of Musk "not getting it" include the "Thai Cave" incident where he wanted to build a sub to drive through water filled tunnels and pop up and rescue the kids like an episode in some submarine sci-fi TV show. The problem was that anyone watching more than ten minutes of any news coverage of that event knew the caves were not all water filled and his solution was preposterous. So then he then engaged in defamation, calling the guy that actually got the kids out a "pedophile" and questions his motivation. I mean, that doesn't scream out-and-out genius to me, not the sort I would prefer to admire like Stephen Hawking.
Tesla also has a fairly horrendous worker safety record, one of the worst in the automotive world if not manufacturing in general IIRC. Lax safety practices are not productive and cannot be written off as Musk being "driven with an insane work ethic". That reeks of a two steps forward, one backward mentality. He said he was going to make ventilators, but ended up sending CA CPAP machines instead! He wants to relocated? Go to the Midwest and set up next to the meat processing plants closed by COVID-19 infections!
That being said, no one wants Tesla to succeed more than I do. Tesla has a huge factory here not that far from my place, I love Tesla cars and fully believe in a lot of his underlying ethos and I do agree with Musk on some issues like the existential dangers of unrestrained, ill thought out, AI. He has been successful in turning Tesla to profitability and his Space X is great. One of the reasons that SpaceX seems to work is that Elon lets someone else run it and stays out of the way as the ideas guy. Maybe something he'd be better off doing in Tesla...