Molehill Mountain Episode 4 – Is Life Just One Big Video Game?

Elon Musk is actually far from the first to come up with the possibility that we might all be living in a simulation. There are a lot of problems with this idea, many of which you brought up. A couple other key ones are:

–It ignores the possibility that there might be insurmountable limits to technology (eg. the speed of light limit, which we’re already starting to have problems with in computers). Technology might keep increasing asymptotically to some limit, and never get good enough to do these simulations.
–A simulation is always going to be more complex than what it’s simulating, so there’s no way a simulation of our universe could exist within our universe, unless it made some gross simplifications.
–It violates Occam Razor to a ridiculous extent. The simplest explanation for the existence of our universe is that our universe is real and exists. To say that no, a more complicated universe exists which simulates ours is coming up with a much more complicated explanation that isn’t merited by the evidence.
–It’s unfalsifiable. There’s nothing that can’t be explained by it, so it has no predictive power, making it fundamentally useless.

Sure, it’s technically possible, but it’s also technically possible that this internet comment was brought to you by a monkey pounding randomly at a keyboard. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s worth considering and is anyone going to give me a banana? I was promised a banana.

I don’t recall you explicitly saying he came up with it, but I also don’t recall you mentioning that it was an old idea.

Of course, there are plenty of people of commenting age who are too young to have seen it when it came out. And the sequels certainly didn’t do the original any favors, as far as cementing it in place as a must-see classic (which I think it is, even if it’s not as “deep” as the Wachowskis seem to think).