We live in a digital age and our representation of the world is more and more digital. It seems possible to represent any process by an algorithm and everything seems derived from information (it from bit). It becomes more and more difficult to distinguish our own world from a vitual world.
For the swedish philosopherNick Bostrom, it is very likely that our world is virtual. He derives this conclusion from the observation that, most likely, other advanced civilizations have already existed in the universe and that they were able to generate many virtual worlds such as ours. It is therefore most likely that we are one of them. The only problem is that Nick Bostrom does not seem to make any difference between a vrtual world and a world within which we feel and suffer. For the time being no software is able to create awareness. Unless of course, we are the hallucinated spectators of a simulation game. What will happen when the game is over?
Les progrès de l’informatique
introduisent une nouvelle représentation du monde qui devient de plus
« digitale ». On a vu émerger aux Etats-Unis le concept de
convergence des NBIC (nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, techniques de
l’information et sciences cognitives), suite au rapport rédigé dès 2002 par
William Sims Bainbridge et Mihail Roco[1]. Les
auteurs de ce rapport revendiquent une vision unifiée de la science et de la
technologie. Selon cette vision unifiée, tout processus est analysé comme un
algorithme. Dès lors, que ce soit dans
le domaine des nano-assemblages d’atomes ou dans celui de l’ingénierie
génétique, il suffit d’identifier l’algorithme à mettre en œuvre pour maîtriser
le processus.
