Hey, this is Paris. I hope you enjoyed the Data Vampire series that we did back in October.

It's had a fantastic response. And for that series, I spoke to a bunch of experts.

And now we're releasing the full-length versions of those interviews for our supporters over on patreon.com.

And I wanted to give you a preview of what those interviews sound like.

So you can consider whether to go to patreon.com

slash tech won't save us, become a supporter yourself, so you can learn even more about the

important topics that we dug into in that special series. So enjoy this clip from my interview

with Emil Torres. So we've talked about a lot of aspects of this stuff in the past, of course, and you've written about much more.

For this series in particular, I'm interested in learning a bit more about Nick Bostrom's simulation theory and where that comes from and how he formulated it.

So I think that first of all, it's important to distinguish between what is called the simulation

hypothesis and the simulation argument.

So there was a paper that was published, I believe in 2003 by Nick Bostrom that introduced

the simulation argument.

And the simulation hypothesis is a part of that argument.

The argument essentially says that there are at least one of the

three following propositions must be true. Either our species goes extinct, probably in the relative

near future, before we create a post-human civilization. Or it's the case that any post-human civilization

is, for some reason, very unlikely to run simulations of its past, which are sometimes called ancestor simulations.

The third disjunct is that we almost certainly live in a computer simulation right now.

And the reason for that third disjunct is,

okay, if we don't go extinct, we survive into the future, we do build this post-human civilization,

and there isn't some moral or legal or some other restriction that prevents our future

...