https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/why-trump-and-musk-may-be-snotty-alien-gamers-in-a-simulated-human-reality,21407
Why Trump and Musk may be snotty alien gamers in a simulated human reality
13 August 2026, 5:00pm
Ever thought reality didn't seem quite real? Well, modern science's increasingly supported "simulation hypothesis" suggests you may well be right.
A LOT OF PEOPLE worry about artificial intelligence, but what if the reality is machine intelligence is real and ours is artificial?
Or to put it differently, what if our universe is some sort of highly advanced computer simulation and each of us is a sentient construct existing – if exist is the correct term – unwittingly within this artificial paradigm.
Like the Hollywood blockbuster series The Matrix, but without us having a biological body at all — just a binary series of ones and twos, stored and acting out our fake lives in a vastly capacious computer storage device, not even knowing we’re not really real.
This “simulation hypothesis”, once just a favourite of science fiction, is now a branch of physics swiftly gaining academic support and respectability.
For instance, in 2018, respected astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told NBC News he estimated the likelihood we are in a simulation as "better than 50-50", adding, "I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none".
It often seems physics trails lamentably behind the imagination of science fiction, where this hypothesis has been a staple for decades.
For example, the Tron and Matrix movies all foresaw a future where fully sentient human constructs could be living within simulated digital environments.
Of course, all advanced a largely dystopian vision for the future, something largely shared by most media representations of artificial intelligence today.
An alternative vision of the simulation hypothesis was notably advanced by acclaimed – now sadly deceased – Scottish author Iain M Banks.
In his Culture series of stories, published from 1984 to 2012, Banks posited a far more positive future for artificial intelligence. A fascinating vision of a space-faring, post-scarcity (post-money), progressive humanity governed by benevolent, super-intelligent computer minds.
As opposed to the grim future many foresee for AI, such as the one proposed in the Terminator movies, Banks imagined one in which mostly benign super-advanced AI “Minds” would run things for the general betterment of all.
Well, except for a few pesky aliens, maybe, but they were always sorted out by the last few pages.
Banks explored the idea of a simulated reality in most detail in his 2010 novel Surface Detail, the last book published during his lifetime.
In this book, for instance, a schismatic offshoot of the Culture staged a simulated war to determine whether their societies, as a punitive justice measure, should be allowed to run artificial post-life “Hells”.
In them, the mind-states of criminals were downloaded into human constructs and placed into a Hades-like simulated afterlife. The advanced computer minds of the Culture, fiercely anti-Hell, initially opted to stay out of the war while accepting the outcome as binding.
But you know, shit happened…
The idea of afterlives, in which human minds are able to be downloaded digitally and stored in simulated environments though not ones in which we are tormented for all eternity is a potentially attractive idea when it comes to the simulated reality concept.
For instance, one of the main architects of the “cyberpunk” genre, William Gibson, featured an AI-based idea that is becoming more plausible by the day. Such as in his 1996 novel Idoru, in which an AI pop star was transferred into an artificially created, yet essentially human body.
This is no doubt the dream of the middle-aged men popularly portrayed in the media proudly carrying on love affairs with sexy AI screen sirens.
You may have even met someone like, for example, Maddison Leigh. And who could doubt that AI androids are [ahem] coming in a decade not too distant from today's.
But there is a big difference between knowingly living in a simulated afterlife, even a hellish one; or being consciously downloaded as a sentient AI to an artificial body; to being an artificial intelligence living in a simulated reality you think is real.
And it is this deeply disturbing possibility, not those others, which physicists are increasingly suggesting is the nature of our “reality” — what we perceive as our "Universe".
Iain M Banks, who was widely regarded as the greatest British science fiction author of all time, also, of course, perceived this sinister-sounding possibility.
Banks’ “Culture”, mostly set about 1,000 years in the future, was a utopian society, which, despite possessing no written laws and being facilitated by super-intelligent AI Minds, was a democracy — of sorts.
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