It’s increasingly likely we’re living in the Matrix. Just ask this MIT professor

In the new edition of my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, released in July, I’ve updated my estimate of how likely we are to be in a simulation to approximately 70%, thanks to recent AI developments. This means we are almost certainly inside a virtual reality world like that depicted in The Matrix, the most talked about film of the last year of the twentieth century.

Even young people who weren’t born in 1999 tend to know the basic plot of this blockbuster: Neo (Keanu Reeves) thinks he’s living in the real world, working in a cubicle in a mega software corporation, only to discover, with the help of Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), that he’s living inside a computer-generated world.

The AI Factor

What makes me so sure that we are living in a simulation? There