Are We Living in a Computer Simulation

By Nick Bostrom. 2003

498 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/857d288ea7a2336886cc652a6ecdb242ebcabb4b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Roman V Yampolskiy
2. Stuart Armstrong
3. Thomas K. Metzinger
4. Michael Madary
5. Nick Bostrom

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Roman V Yampolskiy
2. Thomas K. Metzinger
3. Michael Madary
4. Anders Sandberg
5. Stuart Armstrong
6. Nick Bostrom

Citations in the corpus

• The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents (2012, background): “…various generate convergent instrumental reasons depending on the agent’s guesses about what types of simulations it is most likely to be in. Cf. Bostrom (2003). deliberate effort to construct a superintelligence that values such things, or to build one that values human welfare, moral…”
• Thinking Inside the Box: Controlling and Using an Oracle AI (2012, background): “Are you yourself not currently being simulated by an OAI seeking to resolve a specific question on human psychology (Bostrom 2003a)?”
• The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (2019, unknown): “…substantial exogenously set rate of civilizational destruction (e.g. natural disasters, random simulation terminations unrelated to our activities Bostrom, 2003), and while we allow time to lapse we incur a cumulative risk of being destroyed before maxing out our technological potential; (4)…”
• Virtual reality and augmented reality in social learning spaces: a literature review (2020, background): “…1935), and much earlier within the philosophical realm, when humans started to consider whether our perceived reality is an “absolute” reality, rather than merely “shadows on a cave wall” (Plato and Lee 1974), “a dream” (Descartes and Cress 1993) or a robust “computer simulation” (Bostrom 2003).”
• Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology (2016, background): “Along these lines, one may suggest that the artificial nature of the virtual environment is not as important compared to whether or not the environment affords intersubjective engagement experienced as meaningful (see Bostrom, 2003, p. 245–55 and Chalmers, 2005 for similar ideas).”
• Utility function security in artificially intelligent agents (2014, background): “Importantly, we should not forget that a possibility remains that our universe itself is just a very large ‘box’ (Bostrom, 2003).”