In 2003, Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford, Nick Bostrom formulated his simulation hypothesis in a paper called, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Bostrom used mathematical probability and logic to determine that it’s more likely that we’re living in a computer simulation than reality. The Internet has been awash with spooky, hypothetical discussions of the theory and its implications since. Everyone from top-tier philosophers to Elon Musk and Joe Rogan have discussed exactly that scenario. You’ve probably pondered it yourself.

Bostrom’s argument hinged on the idea that, with technology’s rapidly ascendant growth, we’re perched on the precipice of a “posthuman” stage of evolution, when humans take a back seat and machines run the show. He argued humans are “very likely to go extinct” before reaching that stage, with ever-present global threats like climate change and nuclear war. Follow this line of thinking down the rabbit hole, and it becomes clear: either humanity is soon obliterated or we live in a simulation. The longer humanity survives without annihilation, the better the chances we’ve survived long enough into the future to build machines capable of creating simulations of their history—and our current lives are those simulations.

Any one society wouldn’t build a single simulation, but many, and eventually, other societies would follow suit, building their own simulations. Thus, because there would be multitudinous artificial realities, and one “true” reality, the odds are greater that the reality we’re living in is a simulation, not the “true” reality. If they build 1,000 simulations, the odds are 1/1,000 that we’re living in the “true” reality.

The Singularity

In 2014, Bostrom built off this hypothesis in his book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, in which he discussed the looming Singularity and how to mitigate world destruction. The Singularity, in Bostrom’s view, is the point where technological progress becomes so rapid—when humans build machines that build machines whose intelligence eventually surpasses human intelligence—that humans won’t be able to pull the plug on progress. But others have had different conceptions of The Singularity.

Popularized by the 2012 film, The Singularity, it was a hot topic throughout the 2010s. The inventor, Ray Kurzweil, predicted the Singularity would be the point where humans and machines merge. “Nanobots” would be inside our blood, patching up arteries and surveilling our blood sugar, like the Apple Watch tracks our vitals. Ten years later, ChatGPT hit in November 2022 and Internet chatter shifted. We abandoned dreams of helpful nanobots for fears of widespread unemployment and an AI arms race.

Two-and-a-half years into the ChatGPT-inspired-AI-mania we presently inhabit seems the perfect time to look back on The Singularity with a longer lens, to glean some perspective from past prophecies about the future of AI. Rather than a far-off probability in the remote future, the Singularity, I argue, is already here—it’s just not what any of us expected.

To understand the concept of the Singularity, and AI generally, let’s tease out some distinctions between mind and machine, and we need to explore the larger question of the nature of reality. Let’s trace minds and machines through history until we reach the Singularity.

Subscribe now

A History of Plastic Realities

The Singularity is like the mind-body problem on steroids: instead of “where do our minds end and our bodies begin,” it's the altered version of “where do our minds end and our machines begin?” Bostrom wasn’t the first to wonder if the universe we inhabit wasn’t a kind of synthetic reality. From Ancient philosophers to the 1999 hit film, The Matrix, humans have, since time immemorial, wondered if what we experience is all there is.

Most of us know Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from his 4th-century BCE work Republic. The Upanishads of India discussed the idea that reality might not be what it seems between 800 BCE and 300 BCE. Both discuss a world “out there” somewhere that can’t be perceived by our all-too-human senses.

19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — predating the multiverse theories of modern physics — flirted with an idea called Eternal Recurrence, the idea that our lives endlessly repeat and, when you die, your whole life starts over again unchanged. Your destiny, according to Eternal Recurrence, is to live the same life, like a playlist on repeat, infinitely. Nietzsche argued we should live in such a way that, if we had to live the same life endlessly, over and over, we would be happy with the choices we made.

Sometime between 476 and 221 BCE, the Ancient Chinese writer Zhuang Zhou discussed simulated reality in the quaint story The Butterfly Dream:

Once upon a time, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and tither, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, not knowing it was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, I woke, and came to myself, the veritable Zhuang Zhou. Now, I do not know whether it was then that I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

Since I was a child, I’ve wondered about the possible infinite regress of dreams. Could it be possible that, when we dream, we only remember a fraction of our dreams, and that the entities we are when we dream have entire lives of their own, complete with dreams of their own, with entities within those dreams who also have dreams of their own ad infinitum? Or, as Edgar Allan Poe mused in A Dream Within a Dream, “Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?”

Descartes’ Dualism

In the late-Roman and post-Roman eras, Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe. Judaism and Christianity both speak at length about the spirit world as separate from the physical world, and post-Roman philosophy followed this path. Philosophers speculated about the distinction between mind and body across the centuries, culminating in the view that’s widely held today, popularized by French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th-century, Cartesian dualism:

Cartesian dualism is the view that minds are made of a substance which is completely different from the stuff that our bodies are made of. It is dualistic because it posits two kinds of substances: material substances occupy a certain amount of space (and our bodies and everything else in the world are composed of them), while immaterial substances do not occupy any space.

For Descartes, the mind ended where our physical bodies began. The mind, or spirit, controlled the organic mechanisms of the body. How this process worked wasn’t quite spelled out. His famous line, “I think; therefore I am,” was expanded on in his work, Discourse.

Though philosophical, this was a classic argument for the spirit world, and it stood dominant for centuries, finally beginning to wane under the pressure of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin, the unrelenting assault on the rational mind by Sigmund Freud, the bold irreligiosity of Friedrich Nietzsche, and late-19th-century thinkers.

Heidegger’s Insurrection

The death blow to Cartesian dualism came following World War I, when the nations of Europe and America were reeling from the catastrophic loss of life that unfolded on the battlefield in four short years. Millions had died from war, and tens of millions more had died from the 1918 influenza pandemic that spanned the world. This colossal tragedy left scars. Germany’s culture (and language) changed rapidly after the war, and several grim works published around this time sought to progress beyond the embarrassment of the loss while recapturing lost glory. One such work was the 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Though incomplete, Being and Time is a dense and comprehensive work of metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that discusses the nature of reality based on fundamental principles. Heidegger situated the human in-the-world, arguing that the mind that we call the “self” is really never separate from The Situation we inhabit, closing the gap between mind and body (and world). Heidegger astutely realized that there’s no such thing as analyzing just the mind or just the body, since neither of these exist in a vacuum.

In psychology, behaviorism was soon on the upswing, the belief that minds are like computers and can be trained from the outside, molded however we’d like. We’ve since discovered genetics, disproving behaviorism, but Heidegger’s great innovation—that we’re inseparable from our environments—remained with us. Darwin argued that our bodies were products of millions of years of evolution responding to environmental pressures; Heidegger argued that minds, too, are products of the environment.

From Flesh to Machine

Bostrom and The Matrix were, in some ways, following a long tradition of people who wondered what lies beyond the reality we can touch and feel. But in other ways, both strayed from the well-beaten path. Everyone before them wondered about organic, rather than mechanical, reality. This adds a wrinkle to the mind-body problem, one that would be glossed over by Bostrom and Kurzweil—namely, they forgot their Heidegger.

You see, the mind-body problem is distinct from the mind-machine problem because the body can never be the environment the way machines have quickly become. Kurzweil pointed to machines inside our bodies as a staple of the Singularity, rather than machines inside our minds.

Today, most people wake up and check their computer or smartphone first thing in the morning. We check it throughout the day. It pummels us with the latest news. It harbors our social connections and fuels our emotions.

The machines are with us 24–7 and far from being components of our lives—instruments or tools, as Heidegger would call them—they’ve subsumed our natural environments more and more with each passing year. The Internet, and the machines that facilitated it, were once aspects of our lives, virtual realities we would enter and exit whenever we wanted. Across the 2010s, that changed—and nobody seemed to notice.

They were expecting a flesh-and-blood Übermenschen, a sort of material evolution of humanity that would eventually correspond, physically, rather than mentally, with the mechanical evolution of machines. We were so busy wondering when the hardware machines would live in our bodies, we forgot that we use computers to interface with software using our minds.

And we’ve only now begun to work up the bravery required to admit to ourselves that the machines warp and shape the surrounding reality, having potent effects on the human mind; and even then, we can only usually admit this about other people.

If, as Darwin showed, humans evolved over millions of years to respond to our environments, and, our environments are increasingly constructed from the virtual realities fixed inside our screens, then the transition from human to “posthuman” has already happened. The virtual environments are shaping us in ways we haven’t quite reckoned with. All we need to grant for this to be true is the fact that our minds, like our bodies, are shaped by our environments—a premise with ample evidence.

From Machines to Mind-Machines

Picture this: thousands of people descend upon the U.S. Capitol, outraged at what they believe is an election stolen by Joe Biden from Donald Trump. The furious crowd breaks into the Capitol building, vandalizing it, with some claiming they want to assassinate members of Congress. In each of their pockets sits a device no larger than seven inches. It’s the same device that’s brought them to their belief that the election was, in fact, stolen.

All the algorithmically-sifted information they’ve imbibed on the subject has shown them, convincingly, that it was stolen. For many, no one person said directly to them that the election was stolen. No, it was absorbed, like osmosis, from the virtual environments they inhabited. In 2022, Pew Research found that “U.S. adults under 30 now trust information from social media almost as much as from national news outlets.” The difference, of course, being that you didn’t take the national news with you everywhere you went in 1995 or 2005—but you likely did in 2015.

We often say that the January 6th rioters and insurrectionists believed the election was stolen “without evidence”—but in the warped world of online filter bubbles, it’s more accurate to say they had “no good evidence.” From their perspective, the evidence was all around them—their screens flickering text and videos telling them constantly of a stolen election.

The New York Times article by Nathaniel Rich on Kurzweil’s book specifically mentions a Metaverse-like virtual reality:

Nanobots will connect us directly to virtual worlds, so that we will be able to scale Mount Everest, attend an opera or take “a sensory-rich virtual beach vacation for the whole family” in our minds. Why bother with damp bathing suits and sunscreen when you can enjoy abundant “natural beauty” from your own bed — or cryo-capsule?

Instead of a “sensory-rich virtual beach vacation” we got emotionally rich beliefs about the world around us, beliefs that warp and skew our understanding of bona fide facts. Those beliefs aren’t always good.

Simulated Situations

Machines are starting to dictate most aspects of our lives, from finance to politics, from health to communications and beyond, and it’s not the hardware doing so — it’s the software. When we speak of suggestion algorithms, what we’re really saying is that we’re externalizing our decisions to the machines themselves. We intuit this every time we try to talk a friend or family member out of a deep, conspiratorial rabbit hole they’ve fallen into. We understand this every time we read an article that fills us with dread, and, to ease that anxiety, we doomscroll for hours.

If we’d consulted the Upanishads, Republic, and The Butterfly Story, we might have known that we don’t need to merge physically with machines to integrate with them mentally. What did we expect such a coalescence to look like? Were we expecting Skynet and machines dominating us with plasma guns from the sky? If so, we’re operating on Descartes’ dated idea that we’re in complete control of our minds, which control our bodies.

Heidegger’s concept of the Situation no longer contains merely the physical world, but virtual worlds as well. The simulation is here; so is the Singularity. They just aren’t what we were expecting.

We don’t need hypotheses about distant simulated worlds; we’re living in many simulations already, the ones we interact with when we turn on our screens. Whenever we power our screens on, our minds engage the software on the machines, creating a two-way connection, a symbiosis. We needn’t seek robots in our blood when we already have robots in our minds.

Now, the question is: what do we do with this information—where do we go from here? I think we’d be wise to consider Nietzsche’s advice: power off the screens so you can go out and live like you’ll have to repeat this day endlessly for all eternity.