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Flying 24,000 miles to brave the great Aussie
survival game
I'M off
to play a game. By the time you read this, I'll have completed
a week-long seminar on the rules and be ready to start tomorrow
(Saturday). You can tell this is a serious game, not just
because it takes seven days to prepare but because there's
a day-long, 24,000-mile flight to reach the playing field.
Games, as a rule, don't thrill me. I can't see the point of
spending all morning at a PlayStation, racing rally cars through
the streets of Monaco, when there's a real car outside the
front door.
If I liked
being behind the wheel that much, I could go and spend four
hours stuck in the contraflow between Junctions 10 and 11
on the M4.
At various
times, people have tried to teach me the basics of poker,
chess, Monopoly, 21, twister, snooker, Cluedo, bridge, Tomb
Raider, American football, Doom, whist, checkers, ludo, ducks
and geese, Family Fortunes, Call My Bluff, Tetris, baseball
and snap. I still remember how to play snap.
But any
nervousness I felt at flying around the world to play this
new game was allayed by a Yale philosopher called Nick Bostrom
who has proved, logically, beyond any reasonable doubt, that
I have been playing in a game all my life.
A computer
game.
I am,
in fact, a computer simulation. And so are you. So is the
universe. It's all virtual reality.
Bostrom
is quite serious about this. He's an analyst of artificial
intelligence, and since 1998 he's been predicting that, unless
humanity destroys itself, or our microchips do it for us,
we will create silicon brains that are far more intelligent
than any carbon-based lifeform could ever be.
He's not
talking about chess-playing calculators like IBM's Deep Blue
that can thrash grandmasters; Bostrom expects conscious, emotional
machines to evolve, possibly within two decades.
The figures
are simple. Computers get twice as smart every 18 months,
125 times faster every decade, 1,000 times faster every 15
years. By 2032, we'll have microchips a million times more
powerful.
That's
a conservative estimate, by the way, because some time in
the next 30 years computers are going to start redesigning
themselves and you can bet they'll be a lot more efficient
at it than the average sleep-deprived, pizza-nourished teenage
techie.
Any brain
that's a million times faster than today's best supercomputers
will be able to simulate a virtual universe that looks real.
Think of what computers can already cook up, in movies like
Vanilla Sky and Minority Report.
The key
to Bostrom's theory is this: one day, computer-simulated worlds
will be peopled by beings that are conscious. They'll think
they're alive. They'll think they are real.
And there
won't be just one of these simulations running - playing God
will be such a powerful attraction to consumers that everyone
in the real world will rush to buy a machine that can switch
universes on and off at the flick of a button.
There
will be millions, hundreds of millions, of artificial worlds
running inside plastic boxes. And the creatures in these worlds
will evolve, until they develop computers themselves, silicon
mega-minds of their own, and then they will all want to play
God too.
Of course,
the simulations won't be perfect. There will probably be logical
inconsistencies, so that questions such as ''Where did we
all come from?'' and ''Who created us?'' will be unanswerable.
No problem:
the sim-creatures will just have to make up creation myths
or ludicrous Big Bang theories.
And if
they look too closely at the fabric of their universe, they
will see it doesn't make any sense: at the tiniest levels,
particles will seem to pop in and out of existence. No problem:
the sim- creatures will be pre-programmed to shrug off everything
they don't understand.
If Bostrom
is right, the chances that our universe is the original, pre-computer,
real thing are mind-numbingly small. The fact is, we're computer-generated.
Our creator is probably computer- generated too.
It's alarming
to realise that all my Jewish faith is so startlingly wrong
but comforting to realise that the Muslims, Buddhists, Christians
and Rastafarians were all utterly misguided too.
God, according
to the Yale theory, is not a divine being, nor a universal
energy. The universal energy probably comes from a pack of
AA batteries. And our infinite universe is a programme running
in a 22nd century GameBoy, in the hands of a fidgety 10-year-old
who is about to switch us off so he can go and play football
instead.
The meaninglessness
of it all makes me feel better about jetting to Australia
to play my own game. It's a version of the Survivor show,
that reality TV extravaganza which pits a team of hardy lunatics
against the elements.
My version
is called I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!
I am not
joking. Would I be flippant about a concept which could end
with my being torn limb from limb by crocodiles, or ravaged
by wombats? And, what's worse, on live television?
My fellow
survivors include Christine Hamilton, Tony Blackburn, Nigel
Benn, Rhona Cameron, Darren Day, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and
Nell McAndrew. The show will run for two weeks, on ITV nightly,
and you'll get the chance to vote me off the show at every
turn.
I won't
hold it against you. We're filming in Queensland, north Australia,
at the height of the rainy season, and I've already been shown
a few of the scorpions who will be among my co-stars.
You don't
believe me. You didn't believe me about the computer-generated
universes either. But it's all true. I almost hope that God,
aged 10, switches off his GameBoy before I get to Queensland...
Email
him at urigeller@compuserve.com
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