Bank of America Claims We Are All Living In A Matrix

There is a 50% chance that humans are living in a virtual reality simulation akin to what is seen in The Matrix movies, according to executives at Bank of America. 

In a memo to clients on Tuesday, Bank of America wrote that there was a 20%-50% chance that humans are living in the matrix – and everything we see and experience around us is just as fake as the numbers on a bank tellers screen.

Businessinsider.com reports:

The firm cites comments from Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Nick Bostrom’s seminal paper on the issue as the basis for its 20%-50% view.

Here’s BAML (emphasis added):

“Many scientists, philosophers, and business leaders believe that there is a 20-50% probability that humans are already living in a computer-simulated virtual world. In April 2016, researchers gathered at the American Museum of Natural History to debate this notion. The argument is that we are already approaching photorealistic 3D simulations that millions of people can simultaneously participate in. It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilizations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors.”

BAML also notably highlights Nick Bostrom’s three probable scenarios for the human race, which are 1. extinction before reaching a “posthuman” stage, 2. reaching posthuman existence but not simulating evolutionary history, and 3. we are in the matrix already.

Reading Bostrom’s 2003 paper, however, makes clear we’d never really have access to full knowledge of any of these scenarios because, as Bostrom concludes, “Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.”

This “if true, then true, otherwise false” construct means none of this philosophical struggle really matters anyway.

We’re either in the matrix or we’re not. And if we’re not, we’re unlikely to create the matrix because if the matrix were plausible it would’ve been created anyway. And we’d be in it.

The investment implications remain unclear.