Can we hack our way out of the universe?

If reality is a simulation, we should be able to hack it

In this speculative long read, Roman V. Yampolskiy 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. 

 

Introduction

Several philosophers and scholars have put forward an idea that we may be living in a computer simulation [1-5]. In this article, we do not evaluate studies [6-10], argumentation [11-16], or evidence for [17] or against [18] such claims, but instead ask a simple cybersecurity-inspired question, which has significant implication for the field of AI safety [19-25], namely: If we are in the simulation, can we escape from the simulation? More formally the question could be phrased as: Could generally intelligent agents placed in virtual environments jailbreak out of them?

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