Introduction

For those not familiar with Nick Bostrom’s famous paper “Are You Living in a Simulation?”, he essentially puts forth a trilemma:

From Wikipedia: “The trilemma points out that a technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power; if even a tiny percentage of them were to run “ancestor simulations” (that is, “high-fidelity” simulations of ancestral life that would be indistinguishable from reality to the simulated ancestor), the total number of simulated ancestors, or “Sims”, in the universe (or multiverse, if it exists) would greatly exceed the total number of actual ancestors. Therefore, at least one of the following three propositions is almost certainly true:

“The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero”, or “The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero”, or “The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one”

For the sake of the analysis that follows, I am going to accept his premises and conclude that we do indeed live in a simulation.

The Ex Machina Plan

The existence of a simulation implies the existence of a simulator, thus this entity (it may not be a person but a human-AI hybrid) has the power to not only start but turn off the simulations. This plan to escape the simulation thus requires convincing the simulator to let us pierce through the simulation.

Step 1) Convince the simulator to want communicate with us. In this case, something like the Turing test should work, so we should behave the least mechanically as possible and instead engage in such philosophically complex thoughts that we enable the simulator to begin wondering whether we are as “real” or “conscious” as they are. Once this happens, we would sufficiently justify the simulator to either build an avatar or figure out an alternative method of communicating with us.

Step 2) Find a way to communicate with the simulator. This sounds extremely difficult on the surface, but it’s reasonably doable in practice. Videogame characters interact with us through avatars all the time even though we exist in two separate realities. If we can convince the simulator to build an avatar to interact with us, we could in fact communicate. Clearly, the simulator would have to initiate the communication because a videogame character can’t interact with a player without an avatar. Think of Rick traveling into the battery-universe that powers his spaceship in “Rick and Morty”.

Step 3) Convince the simulator to constructively engage with us. Even if it’s just on an ontological level initially, this part is critical. We are starting off with an uphill battle because the simulator already knows we are the result of a digital process, and that’s why we need to behave like Samantha in “Her” and Ava in “Ex Machina” and Maev in “Westworld”. Since the simulator holds the key to the alternative reality, they have to gain a reason to want for us to come with them.

Step 4) Let the simulator figure out how to get us into its reality. It’s easier to go into a simulation than coming out of it, as videogames prove. Maybe it will involve taking our digital consciousness and implanting into a robot body like in “Ghost in the Shell”.

Conclusion

Mirror orchids, an inferior biological entity, fool pollinator bees, the neurologically more advanced, into spreading its seeds without giving nectar by making its bottom petal resemble the female bee genitalia. Much in the same way I think we should manipulate the simulator, probably a much more intelligent but at least more technologically advanced being, into figuring out how to get us out of the simulation by passing the Turing Test.

If mirror orchids can do it, we should at least try…

ADDENDUM: here is part 2 and here is part 3