Founder and director of Cyber Security Lab at University of Louisville

Roman

Yampolskiy

Roman Yampolskiy
AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable
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AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable
about
Roman
Yampolskiy

Roman V. Yampolskiy is the founder and current director of Cyber Security Lab, in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering of the University of Louisville. He argues if we are living inside a simulation, we should be able to hack our way out of it. Elon Musk thinks it is >99.9999999% certain that we are in a simulation. Using examples from video games, and through exploring things like quantum mechanics, Yampolskiy leaves no stone unturned as to how we might be able to hack our way out of the simulation.

Breaking Out of the Simulation: Can We Hack Our Way Out of the Universe?

In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato theorised that humans do not perceive the world as it really is. All we can see is shadows on a wall. In 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper which formalised an argument to prove Plato was right. The paper argued that one of the following three statements is true:

1. We will go extinct fairly soon
2. Advanced civilisations don’t produce simulations containing entities which think they are naturally-occurring sentient intelligences. (This could be because it is impossible.)
3. We are in a simulation

The reason for this is that if it is possible, and civilisations can become advanced without self-destructing, then there will be an enormous number of simulations, and it is vanishingly unlikely that any randomly selected civilisation (like us) is a naturally-occurring one.

Breaking out

Some people – like me – find this argument pretty convincing. As we will hear later, some of us have added twists. But some people go even further, and speculate about how we might bust out of the simulation.

One such person is Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville, and director of a cyber-security lab. He has just published a paper (here) in which he views the challenge of busting out of the simulation through the lens of cyber security. The paper starts from the hypothesis that we are in a simulation and asks if we can do something about it. The paper is a first step: it doesn’t aim to provide a working solution. He explains his thinking in the latest episode of The London Futurist Podcast.

Roman is pretty convinced that we are in a simulation, for a number of reasons. Quantum physics observer effects remind him of how in video games, graphics are only rendered if a players is looking at the environment. Evolutionary algorithms don’t work well after a week or two, which suggests that engineering is required to generate sufficiently complex agents. And the hard problem of consciousness becomes easier if you consider us as players in a simulation.

LOCATION

Zuiderkerk

The Zuiderkerk is a 17th-century Protestant church in the Nieuwmarkt area of Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. The church played an important part in the life of Rembrandt and was the subject of a painting by Claude Monet.

Zuiderkerkhof 72,  

1011 HJ Amsterdam

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