Indeed, what I find much more fascinating is that these ideas are not new at all, but each generation frames it in a new technological light.
It's like how the brain used to be an ocean, then it was a windmill, then it was a steam engine, then it was a computer, and now it's a GPU cloud. I wonder what will come first: humans finally understanding what a brain is, or making one.
SF authors have explored these fascinating concepts without falling into such holes in logic: such as presuming that a technology capable of simulating an incomprehensible volume of intelligence was simultaneously too lazy to leverage that intelligence to not cut corners in the simulation.
That said, I do subscribe to the school that says we must conclude one of the following:
a) civilization in the abstract generally does not progress to the point of being able to simulate itself, or
So what you're saying is that to engineer a system where clients pay me to do work for them, all I need to do is engineer a system where clients pay me to do work for them?
It's like how the brain used to be an ocean, then it was a windmill, then it was a steam engine, then it was a computer, and now it's a GPU cloud. I wonder what will come first: humans finally understanding what a brain is, or making one.