Tesla CEO Elon Musk said it's probable that human beings are living in a Matrix style existence far away from the existence reality and the chances of someone living in the real world amounts to ''one in billions.''
Considering the world's population to be 7.8 billion in 2021, there might be only 7 or 8 people around the globe who are living in reality while the rest of us are living in a stimulated Matrix style artificial reality and things run without our knowledge of what is real and what isn't.
Elon Musk is not the first person to come up with the idea that humans are living in a computer stimulated world. The topic is heavily debated and philosopher Nick Bostrom released a paper in 2003 with the title 'Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?' and said that humans are stimulated beings with ''artificial consciousness.''
He explained that the majority of people's minds do not belong to the original world but belong to the ''people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.''
The question to Musk was asked by the member of an audience at a Code Conference in 2016 but his answer didn't really make it to the news circles back then. The video clip has now resurfaced online during the peak of the pandemic and social media users have began talking about his explanation that not everything around us might be true.
The audience member had asked Musk if people would be unable to distinguish between real life and simulation and he replied, ''The strongest argument for us being in a simulation is the following - that 40 years ago we had Pong (early video game), like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.''
The Space X founder then explained ''Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year, and soon we will have virtual reality or augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.''
He even went on to say that humans with the help of technological advancement have traveled thousands of years in to the future and it's necessary, if not humans may become extinct . ''We should hope that that's true because otherwise if civilization stops advancing then that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization. Either we are going to create simulations that are indistinctual from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options,'' he said.
