Life's a sim and then you're deleted

• 27 July 2002
• Magazine issue 2353

OF COURSE you thought The Matrix was fiction. But only because you were meant to. Do you think they're stupid enough to let us realise what's really going on?

It usually takes a conspiracy theorist to hatch such a far-fetched plot. But Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Yale University, and he believes the Hollywood blockbuster is closer to the truth than many of us would care to believe. He's done the calculations, and he reckons that we could well be living inside a simulation.

That's right. Your life might actually be a computer program developed by a post-human society living in what you think of as the future.

In a paper submitted to the journal Mind, Bostrom has outlined exactly how he reached this chilling conclusion. The reasoning starts with one simple premise. At some point, civilisation will develop enormously powerful computers capable of mimicking what we call consciousness. ...