In the new edition of my 2025 book, “The Simulation Hypothesis,” I’ve updated my estimate of how likely we are to be in a simulation to approximately 70%, thanks to recent AI developments. This means we are almost certainly inside a virtual reality world like that depicted in “The Matrix,” the most talked-about film of the last year of the 20th century.
Even young people who weren’t born in 1999 tend to know the basic plot of this blockbuster: Neo (Keanu Reeves) thinks he’s living in the real world, working in a cubicle in a mega software corporation, only to discover, with the help of Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), that he’s living inside a computer-generated world.
When we reach the simulation point, we would be capable of building something like ‘The Matrix’ ourselves, complete with realistic landscapes, avatars, and AI characters.
What makes me so sure that we are living in a simulation?
There are multiple reasons explored in the book, including a new way to explain quantum weirdness, the strange nature of time and space, information theory and digital physics, spiritual/religious arguments, and even an information-based way to explain glitches in the matrix.
AI am I?
However, even while discounting these other possible reasons we may be in a simulation, the main reason for my new estimate is the rapid advance of AI and virtual reality technology, combined with a statistical argument put forward by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. In the past few years, the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and X’s Grok has proceeded rapidly. We now not only have AI that has passed the Turing test, but we already have rudimentary AI characters living in the virtual world with whom we can interact.
One recent example is prompt-generated video from Google Veo. Recently, Google has introduced the ability to create realistic-looking videos on demand, complete with landscapes that are completely AI-generated and virtual actors speaking real lines of dialogue, all based on prompts. This has led to prompt theory, a viral phenomenon of AI-generated video of realistic characters exclaiming that they were definitely not generated by AI prompts.
Virtual situationship
Another recent example is the release of AI companions from Grok, which combine LLMs with a virtual avatar, leading to a new level of adoption of the rising wave of AI characters that are already serving as virtual friends, therapists, teachers, or even virtual lovers. The sexy anime girl in particular has led to thousands of memes of obsession with virtual characters. The graphics fidelity and responsiveness of these characters will improve — imagine the fidelity of the Google Veo videos combined with a virtual friend/boyfriend/girlfriend/assistant, who can pass what I call the Metaverse or virtual Turing test (described in my new book in detail).
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All of this means we are getting closer than ever to the simulation point, a term I coined a few years ago as a kind of technological singularity. I define this as a theoretical point at which we can create virtual worlds that are indistinguishable from physical reality and AI beings that are indistinguishable from biological beings. In short, when we reach the simulation point, we would be capable of building something like “The Matrix” ourselves, complete with realistic landscapes, avatars, and AI characters.
Ancestor simulation
To understand why our progress in reaching this point might increase the likelihood that we are already in a simulation, we can build on the simulation argument that Bostrom proposed in his 2003 paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”
Bostrom surmised that for a technological civilization like ours, there are only three possibilities when it comes to building highly realistic simulations of the past, which he called ancestor simulations. Each of these simulations would have realistic simulated minds, holding all of the information and computing power a biological brain might hold. We can think of having the capability of building these simulations as approximately similar to my definition of the simulation point.
The first two possibilities, which can be combined for practical purposes, are that no civilization ever reaches the simulation point (i.e., by destroying themselves or because it isn’t possible to create simulations), or that all such civilizations that reached this point decided not to build such sophisticated simulations.
The term “simulation hypothesis” was originally meant by Bostrom to refer to the third possibility, which was that “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.” The logic underlying this third scenario was that any such advanced civilization would be able to create entirely new simulated worlds with the click of a button, each of which could have billions (or trillions) of simulated beings indistinguishable from biological beings. Thus, the number of simulated beings would vastly outnumber the tally of biological beings. Statistically, then, if you couldn’t tell the difference, then you were (much) more likely to be a simulated being than a real, biological one.
Today’s AI developments have convinced me we are at least 67% likely to be able to reach the simulation point and possibly more than 70%.
Bostrom himself initially declined to put a percentage on this third option compared to the other two, saying only that it was one of three possibilities, implying a likelihood of 33.33% (and later changed his odds for the third possibility to be around 20%). Elon Musk used a variation of Bostrom’s logic in 2016 when he said the chances of us being in base reality (i.e. not in a simulation) were one in billions. He was implying that there might be billions of simulated worlds, but only one physical world. Thus, statistically, we are by far highly likely (99.99%+) in a simulated world.
What are the odds?
Others have weighed in on the issue, using variations of the argument, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, who put the percentage likelihood at 50%. Columbia scientist David Kipping, in a paper using Bayesian logic and Bostrom’s argument, came up with a similar figure of slightly less than 50/50.
Musk was relying on the improvement in video game technology and projecting it forward. This is what I do in detail in my book, where I lay out the 10 stages of getting to the simulation point, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), BCIs (brain-computer interfaces), AI, and more. It is the progress in these areas over the past few years that gives me the conviction that we are getting closer to the simulation point than ever before.
In my book, I argue that the percentage likelihood that we are in a simulation is based almost entirely on whether we can reach the simulation point. If we can never reach this point, then the chances are basically zero that we are in a simulation that was already developed by anyone else. If we can reach this point, then the chances of being in a simulation simply boil down to how far from this theoretical point we are, minus some uncertainty factor.
If we have already reached that point, then we can be 99% confident about being in a simulation. Even if we haven’t reached the simulation point (we haven’t, at least not yet), then the likelihood of the simulation hypothesis, Psim , basically simplifies down to Psimpoint, the confidence level we have that we can reach this point, minus some small, extra uncertainty factor (pu).
Psim » Psimpoint – pu
If we are 100% confident we can reach the simulation point, and the small factor pu is 1, then the likelihood of being in a simulation jumps up to 99%. Why? Per the earlier argument, if we can reach this point, then it is very likely that another civilization has already reached this point and that we are inside one of that civilization’s (many) simulations. pu is likely to be small because we have already built uncertainty into our Psimpoint for any value less than 100%.
A matter of capabilities
So in the end, it doesn’t matter when we reach this point; it’s a matter of capabilities. And the more we develop our AI, video game, and virtual reality technology, the more likely it is that at some point soon, we will be able to reach the simulation point.
So how close are we? In the new book, I estimate that we are more than two-thirds of the way there, and I am fairly certain that we will be able to get there eventually. This means that today’s AI developments have convinced me that we are at least 67% likely to be able to reach the simulation point and possibly more than 70%.
If I add in factors from digital and quantum physics detailed in the book, and if we take the “trip reports” of mystics of old and today’s NDErs and psychonauts (who expand their awareness using DMT, for example) at face value, we can be even more confident that our physical reality is not the ultimate reality. Those who report such trips are like Plato’s philosopher, who not only broke his chains but also left Plato’s allegorical cave. If you read Plato’s full allegory, it ends with the philosopher returning to the cave to describe what he saw in the world outside to the other residents, who didn’t believe him and were content to continue watching shadows on the wall. Because most scientists are loath to accept these reports and are likely to dismiss this evidence, I won’t include them in my own percentage estimation, though as I explain in the book, this brings my confidence level that we are in a virtual, rather than a physical, reality even higher.
This brings us back to the inescapable realization that if we will eventually be able to create something like “The Matrix,” someone has likely already done it. While we can debate what is outside our cave, it’s our own rapid progress with AI that makes it more likely than ever that we are already inside something virtual like “The Matrix.”
Tech, Simulation hypothesis, Artificial intelligence, Simulation, Artificial general intelligence, Elon musk, Nick bostrom, The matrix