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“It’s a metaphor for how we’ve gotten to a stage where we can adequately build simulations and AIs so advanced that you feel like you’re playing God.”Īs someone who has developed video games which have been played by 40,000 people - including Louis Vuitton artistic director Virgil Abloh - and is currently building his own metaverse, World Wide Web3, he knows firsthand how easy it is to play virtual God, and why so many people are questioning how ‘real’ their online selves are. “Maybe it’s not so much that we’re in a simulation, but more that we’re so good at building simulations,” he says about the piece’s meaning, which features a coded cross that trades God for a programmer, heaven for clouds, earth for the simulation and creatures for AI. In one of the artworks, “ Genesis Documentation 2021”, he rewrites the genesis story from the perspective of a programmer writing a simulation. Thomas Webb is a digital artist who’s recent solo exhibition, Daddy, what was real life like? explores these societal shifts.
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As Facebook - sorry, Meta - is currently plotting to suck us further down the internet rabbithole by co-opting the concept of the metaverse, you do wonder how much of a choice virtual interaction in 2021 is after all. Moreover, a significant number seem to enjoy the flavour, with 67% of children saying their favourite way of communicating with friends is online, according to data collected by Natterhub, an online safety and digital literacy agency in 2021. Through endless Zoom drinks, Animal Crossing meet-ups, livestreamed approximations of gigs, exhibitions and classes, we’ve all had a taste of what it’s like to exist virtually. We already create these alternative universes, and in the last couple of years people have been quarantined in their homes living in them.” “We already create simulations, right?” says Isabelle Boemeke, a fashion model and nuclear energy influencer who believes we are living in simulation, on the uptick in simulation theory interest. Or maybe the widespread meme-ification of this previously traditionally fringe debate (and, to some extent, the increased acceptance of pro-simulation arguments) says something more insidious about the society we live in. Or perhaps it is closer to the reality imagined in The Matrix, where AI machines have taken over and uploaded us into computers.
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So what does this say about the “reality” that we are living in? Perhaps it is all just a high-resolution video game and you, the reader of this article, and I, the writer of it, are all non-playing characters. It’s why billionaire, Tesla founder and Grimes dater Elon Musk puts the probability that we’re not in a simulation at about one in a billion, and why the popular science magazine Scientific American published an article back in April titled “ Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation”, alluding to the fact that “we already have computers running all kinds of simulations for lower level ‘intelligences’ or algorithms”.
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Considering how far we've come - from the very first 1972 table tennis-themed arcade game Pong, to highly-detailed, contemporary video games like Call of Duty and The Last of Us - the idea that we could one day create complex simulations doesn’t seem all that implausible.