We discussed the spatial part of this paradox in Chapter 9, and concluded that your consciousness is actually observing not the outside world, but ra… - Max Tegmark

After DeepMind’s breakthrough, there’s no reason why a robot can’t ultimately use some variant of deep reinforcement learning to teach itself to walk without help from human programmers: all that’s needed is a system that gives it points whenever it makes progress. Robots in the real world similarly have the potential to learn to swim, fly, play ping-pong, fight and perform a nearly endless list of other motor tasks without help from human programmers. To speed things up and reduce the risk of getting stuck or damaging themselves during the learning process, they would probably do the first stages of their learning in virtual reality.

This is exactly what Alan concluded: it couldn't just have been a crazy fluke coincidence that infinitely many separate regions of space underwent Big Bang explosions all at once-some physical mechanism must have caused both the exploding and the synchronizing. One unexplained Big Bang is bad enough; an infinite number of unexplained Big Bangs in perfect synchronization strains credulity.

This is know as the horizon problem, because it involves what we see on our cosmic horizon, int he most distant regions we can observe.

Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life!