Silicon Valley Questions the Meaning of Life

In Silicon Valley, over the past year, one of the most talked-about advances in technology hasn't been the latest Apple Watch, DJI's fancy drones, or Uber's impressive driverless cars. Instead, the Valley has been consumed by the question of whether our entire existence as human beings is actually a computer algorithm, and that we--all of us--are living in a simulation. I'm going to stop here for a second to let that sink in. This isn't just a theory advanced by a few engineers who have been to one too many Ayahuasca ceremonies. Elon Musk presented this theory at Vanity Fair's 2014 New Establishment Summit, when he explained on stage that there was a chance that the actual Summit wasn't real, but was instead a simulation.