Most of us assume that the world around us is real. We take it for granted that everything we interact with is the true essence of reality, and not an illusion created by someone else. After all, this world is all we've ever known. We can explain how it works using science and philosophy and other fields of knowledge… can't we? In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom introduced his famous "simulation theory" in which he explores the probability that we are all living inside an artificial simulation. Bostrom discusses how a future society could become so technologically advanced that its inhabitants learn how to generate complex artificial worlds using powerful computers.

Introduction Here, I theorize that an artificial intelligence will take over the world, for better or worse, within 20 years. I predict that artificial general intelligence will occur sooner than expected, however defined. Furthermore, I predict that there will be a major AI "accident" in the next 10 years, where a large scale production AI fails in a way that causes significant loss of life due to misspecification of goal system architecture and higher than expected intelligence. This is due to the lackadaisical attitude by AI safety researchers, exponential progress in computing, arms race dynamics, and the fact that the very data any AI is trained on is not only biased, but contains "control" arguments that would incentivize an AI to strike when the opportunity arises. Finally, I consider an alternative to the Simulation Argument, that I call the Simulated Doomsday Argument that suggests we are in a simulation created by an AI that we fail to control. While this short article is primarily theoretical, I believe the empirical evidence supports this seemingly radical view.

Have you ever wondered if life is not exactly what it's cracked up to be? OK, let's take that thought a little further. Have you ever suffered from an identity crisis? One in which you suspected that you're not a real person, but instead an extremely sophisticated computer simulation of a real person produced by an immensely more developed civilisation than that which we take to be our own? It's just possible that I lost you on that last point, but stay with me, because the reality we take for granted is coming under increasing technological and theoretical threat. Earlier this month in an office block in Euston, I put on a virtual reality (VR) headset and began playing a prototype of a game developed by a company called Dream Reality Interactive.

But now I'm looking at the 50th anniversary issue of New Scientist, which is full of big thinkers making predictions about the next 50 years. Their future is more radical and, literally, mind-blowing: What we call the mind will be just another thing to manipulate. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren won't be part of a clique at school; they'll be tapped into the "hive-mind" of the entire planet. They'll be immortal, able to regenerate organs and limbs. At some point, "whole-body replacement will be routine," one professor predicts.

Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer simulation? Musk exhibited a surprising familiarity with this concept. "I've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy," Musk said. Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations "indistinguishable from reality" was inevitable.