What is a game? Ludwig Wittgenstein famously chose this nebulous concept to illustrate what he meant by “family resemblance,” where the individual members of a class can be determined to fulfill no necessary and sufficient conditions for admission, and instead only share some traits with some others in the class, others with others. Yet we can at least identify two types of game, which seem not just distinct from one another but very nearly opposite. One class of games, which includes peek-a-boo, charades, and musical improvisation as representative instances, is characterized by free expressivity. It is the manifestation of what Friedrich Schiller called the Spieltrieb, the “play-drive,” which is innate in all human beings insofar as they are free. The other class includes chess, fencing, and wargames as its representative instances. If there is still some dose of freedom operating in this sort of game, it is freedom under severe constraints. The purpose here is to win, and one does so by means of strategy aforethought. In such games, serendipity and spontaneity are disadvantages. While some such games may, like Schillerian free play, be “fun” (especially when you win and the other guy loses), at their outer edge they shade over into a domain of human endeavor that has little to do with leisure at all. At their most serious they can determine the fate of the world. It is this latter sort of game alone that machines are capable of “understanding.” Strategy games, in other words, are essentially algorithmic. A good portion of the history of computing has been dedicated in fact to training machines up algorithmically in such narrow domains as chess, then Go, and more recently a full array of natural-language processing tasks. This training has facilitated the gradual progress of the machines from domain-specific “weak artificial intelligence” — the ability to master all the possible moves within a given narrow field — to something at least approaching “general AI” — the ability to competently execute the whole range of tasks that we associate with human intelligence. Yet curiously, as the machines draw closer to this peculiar ideal of humanness, the society they have been brought in to structure has grown correspondingly more inhuman. As the scope of algorithm-based applications in social reality has expanded over the past decades, we have by the same measure been conditioned to approach ever more fields of human life as if they were strategy games. The technology was honed in such narrow domains as chess and video poker. By the 2010s it had come to shape public debate as well, in the transfer of the greater part of our deliberative efforts to social-media platforms that are, in effect, nothing more than debate-themed video games, where one racks up points in the form of likes and followers by “gaming the algos,” just as one racks up points in Super Mario Bros. by smashing turtles. Soon enough algorithms bled out from behind the screen too, and began to transform the three-dimensional world of labor, first in “disruptive” app-based companies such as Uber, where gamified structures determine each “move” a driver makes, and then in domains such as warehouse work, where the laborer might never have used an app before signing up, and might not have understood the revolutionary significance of the top-down imposition of gamified structures for the measurement of his work productivity. Finally, the development of social-credit systems for the algorithmic measurement of the civic standing of individuals living under authoritarian regimes extends the gamification process to the entirety of social reality. Life becomes, quite literally, a game, but emphatically not the kind of game that is expressive of our irreducible freedom. On the contrary, the spread of gamified structures to the entirety of life has brought about the near-total eclipse of the one sort of game by the other, the near-total loss of a distinctly human life of Schillerian free play, and the sharp ascendancy of a machine-centered conception of play: play as strategy, as constraint; the extremity of play where it shades over into never-ending high-stakes work and struggle. 
It is against this background that we must understand the recent popularity in some circles of the “simulation argument,” according to which all of reality is, or is likely to be, an algorithmically structured virtual system of essentially the same sort we know from our encounter with video games such as Pac-Man or Minecraft. This is by now an argument with a bit of history behind it. The philosopher Nick Bostrom has been promoting it for a few decades, and by means of it has gained the attention of such tech mandarins as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who unsurprisingly are attracted to the idea that the world itself resembles the very products that they are in the business of selling. The “simulation argument” has more recently been taken up by the philosopher David J. Chalmers in his book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. It is worthwhile to consider this work in some detail, because it is a rich document of our gamified world. The “technophilosophy” that it expounds is perhaps the clearest expression yet of a new sort of hybridism between industry and the academy, in which it is decidedly the first member of this unnatural pair that forms the head of the resulting beast. Philosophy, while in its most enduring expressions always stands apart from the era in which it emerges, also has a long history of subordinating itself to whatever appears in its day as the biggest game going, as the most dazzling center of concentrated power and influence. Once it was theology, then it was science, now it is Big Tech, whose ascendancy required the prior work of the scientists even as it now operates independently of any faithfulness to truth-seeking and has nothing other than capital accumulation as its logic and life-breath. Before turning to Chalmers’ central claims and arguments, some interesting characteristics of our moment are revealed in his style and
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence