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What is the probability that Bostrom himself is a simulation?
I confess that I'm not as interested in this type of tangent. It seems more religious than anything else. Something on the level of Hamlet's "To be or not to be..."
The obvious non-religious answer to Bostrom is that the answer is always undefinable. We can always add another layer or abstraction of religious being with powers far greater than ours.
AI is one thing. Sentience is another. We tend to confuse them, especially when we talk about machine learning.
Can sentience be simulated? In theory, of course. Could we, therefore, be simulated? I don't know how to address that, only that philosophers have asked questions like those for millennia. What is Plato's cave theory?
We contemplate our existence. We crave feeling more than important than we are.
Meanwhile, let's look at AI. We are already capable of and actually creating drones that kill on the battlefield. We don't have to have John Grisham's mind to wonder if companies or governments or individuals have created drones that can or have killed outside of the battlefield.
Are those drones sentient? No. But it's easy to imagine a bug or a feature that's not properly programmed can result in a drone killing in a way that seems like the proverbial newly sentient rogue cyborg gone wild. One could argue that Tesla's self-driving cars are a real-world example (at least to motorcyclists).
But the simple self-evident truth is that whatever shaped the universe made stuff possible, and discovering the secret of whatever whatever is, and whether we can control or manipulate it (through prayer or programming) can be fascinating, but ultimately the self-important fantasy we create while doing so is more interesting than the reality.
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