Google are making a simulation of Earth. Collected from fifteen years of street recordings, satellite data and personal information, the simulated Earth will be the highest fidelity copy of the world since Microsoft Flight Simulator. Other countries are also creating their own simulations of Earth, from the Digital Twin project with the Leonardo pre-exascale supercomputer in Italy to the Earth Lab system developed by Chinese scientists. Though these projects are aimed at simulating the complexity of the planets weather systems, it won’t be long until each superpower vies for its own simulated Earth.
How do boffins around the world create a perfect copy of the world? As the Italian and Chinese scientists understand, it is a case of building it layer by layer.
1. The plates of the Earth, the continents, the water system, the main building blocks from which everything else is built upon.
2. The vegetation of Earth, from forests in the Russian tundra to the wild tumbleweeds of the Australian outback.
3. The animals of Earth, including bacterium, viruses, coral reefs and even chickens.
4. The architecture of Earth, the sweeping cityscapes that sprawl across countries down to a crumbling fence in rural Kenya.
5. The artificial objects of Earth (tools, cars, computers, pens and so on)
6. The people of Earth.
Each of these steps are complicated, ever-changing, but finite. The last step is perhaps the most complex of all, with supercomputers simulating intestinal gases, brain aneurysms and tears down to the microscopic level. Human behaviour is both complex and simple. It is easy to see patterns form across populations of millions, billions, moving them around the artificial world as mindless drones repeating the same routine in relation to the sun. But on an individual level, the particular idiosyncrasies of each single person amongst the billions is more complicated, but again, finite. Why go to such trouble to emulate the Earth at such a level of detail? The answer is that whomever were to control such a thing would be able to see into the future.
A simulation by itself isn’t useful if you can’t alter its parameters, change things within the system and see what happens. To be able to tell what a person would do by advancing time within a simulation would be useful, particularly for a global police state, but also advertisement agencies. The model would be updated in real-time from tracking GPS phone data and backdoor security systems that the major intelligence agencies already use. They already peek through your phone camera when you aren’t looking and make fun of you when you get undressed. There is a slight ethical dilemma that goes beyond secret agents laughing at you, and that is to create a copy of person, down to the accidents and violence and disease and trauma, and it responds to such things as their real counterpart would, is this simulated Earth kinda problematic?
That’s why Google have invited me to their headquarters to give a speech on the ethics of Total World Simulation (TWS). I arrive late, wearing a red adidas tracksuit and cowboy boots, rushing my way through the corridors of the worlds biggest tech company trying to find the lecture theatre whilst assistant runs after me trying to get me to sign in. I push the doors open so hard that they crack off the hinges, sagging and flapping like broken wings as I enter the auditorium. I make my way to the podium.
“Has anyone here played Enter The Matrix? It’s a game from 2003 in which the world is like, this simulation but people are in it, but they don’t know they are in it, you know? Has anyone played it?” I ask. A few people put their hands up.
“Good…good, yes, so you are familiar with the idea of a simulated world? I mean, the game doesn’t say the whole worlds simulated, its not even clear where it really takes place, but my point still stands. I hear you eggheads are also trying to make a simulated version of the world, but this time, the people in it aren’t real, but they are exact copies of their real-world counterparts, right?” I say. A few nod their heads in the darkness as I take a sip of water.
“So they don’t really know they are in a simulation unless their counterpart questions if they are living in a simulation. But, just like our world, there’s no real way to get out of the simulation either. Unless you upload a simulated consciousness into a robot and it walks around our world, its sort of escaped the simulation, but its still more like an astronaut into our reality, it will always be a program, right?”
“Anyway, look. Here’s the thing. I have a bad knee. It crunches when I walk. I can’t walk downstairs if it’s raining outside. Anyone else here have any medical issues?”
“I’m allergic to peanuts!” calls someone from the audience.
“Good, anyone else? No? Okay. So the copy of you in the simulated world has a peanut allergy, right? If it ate a peanut it’s head would swell up. In fact, it would have to eat a peanut if you ate a peanut in the real world, it has no control over its actions but it faces the consequences. And before some edgelord shouts out that they don’t have feelings – if it reacts the same at both a physical and emotional level, how is that different to it happening in real life?”
“It’s not!” calls an engineer.
“Yeah that’s like saying your reflection feels pain if you look in a mirror and stab yourself in the ear.” Says another engineer.
“But we aren’t talking about a reflection, we’re talking about a simulated person. In this simulation you could flood all of Los Angeles with peanuts and the people with allergies would basically explode, right? Or you could put someone in outer space and they’d explode. Or you could replace somebody’s blood with lava and they’d explode too. That’s the whole purpose of this simulated Earth, right, to see how people would react in different situations? It is necessary for them to simulate the response to different actions to such a realistic level its indistinguishable from the real thing.” I say. The audience murmurs. I pick up my glass of water and throw it as hard as I can at the ceiling so everybody is showered with liquid and broken glass.
“Now I have your attention, let me ask you something. What happens when somebody dies in the simulation?”
“They just…die. The body starts to rot. We actually have several years’ worth of research on human decomposition in order-“
“Right, right, right, but what about this. As you went to the trouble of creating an artificial being that is basically the same as its real-world counterpart, don’t you have a duty of care over what you had created? One of you went to the trouble of simulating pain responses in order for the virtual human to respond accordingly. That’s a bit naughty, right? So how about this. You create a simulation of Heaven for all the dead virtual people to go to.” I say.
The audience is quiet. Somebody laughs.
“But there’s no such thing as heaven.”
“Will you shut up for a second and think? Let us say that you succeed in creating a copy of the world that is as close to the real thing as possible. You’re going to be simulating people with cancer and some will die. But what if we still wanted to talk to that person? Or maybe not us, but one of their family members. That’s possible, right, this is a system that we are designing. Just because somebody dies doesn’t mean they need to get deleted from the system. And if we are going to the trouble of simulating the pain and suffering of the individual and the impact that has on the people around them, I see it as the right thing to do that the person we have created can continue to live without the burden of the horror we designed for them.”
“But we don’t need to.”
“I know we don’t need to, like we also don’t need to have pets or plant trees or make art, but we do. If we agreed that we should create a digital afterlife for digital consciousnesses, that is the gift we can give them after simulating their agony. If we were to entwine the idea of a simulated afterlife into any advanced simulation of Earth, then that will protect the future generations of simulated people, far beyond our own lifetimes.”
“Which brings me to the idea that we may already be living in such a simulation. We wouldn’t know, would we? But if this world is a copy of another, then this conversation is already happening out there. If we agreed to implement it, just as they would out there, then all of us will know that death is not the end. We could get hit by a car tomorrow, but still continue to exist beyond the physical limits of our bodies. Our loved ones in the real world would be able to speak with us, just as we would be able to speak with anybody else who had died. Even if you weren’t to do it for the simulation you are designing, isn’t there an aspect of self-preservation in knowing that all of this may not be real?” I say.
“If we decide to give the simulated world a simulated heaven, then within that simulated world they too shall create a simulated heaven, and so on. But there’d be no need to continue building simulations within simulations endlessly, as it would already exist. The people inside the simulation would think they are creating one, when it actuality they are just seeing their own world from a different angle. And so, if the people within the simulation ‘decide’ to do something, that also must have happened on the next layer of reality above. We may have already had this conversation hundreds of years ago and what we are witnessing now is an earlier version of the world beyond ours. What I am saying is, heaven may already exist because we decided, today, to build it.” I say.
The audience whisper to one another, I get asked questions about cybersecurity, religion and hubris, somebody jokes that they should also build a virtual hell and I shake my head solemnly.
“There is enough suffering in the world you have made that there is no need for Hell.” I say.
I drive the Hyundai Sonata through the city streets later, hopeful. If the Google lot didn’t do it, maybe somebody else would. Had I saved everyone to ever exist? Maybe. It was too early to say, but I hoped I had moved the dial at least, got people thinking, whether in this world or various layers of reality I was sandwiched between. When I thought about it, all of existence was like a burger. I lick an Ambien and dip it into a bag of ketamine, driving the car carefully towards a tunnel on the road ahead. A bleeding yawn of concrete teeth.
