I haven’t read Moravec’s book very thoroughly, but I ctrl+f’d for “simulation” and couldn’t see anything very explicitly discussing the idea that we might be living in a simulation. There are a number of instances where Moravec talks about running very detailed simulations (and implying that these would be functionally similar to humans). It’s possible (quite likely?) Bostrom didn’t ever see the 1995 article where Moravec “shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious.”
Either way, it seems true that (1) the idea itself predates Bostrom’s discussion in his 2003 article, (2) Bostrom’s discussion of this specific idea is more detailed than Moravec’s.
Bostrom (2003) cited Moravec (1988), but not for this specific idea—it’s only for the idea that “One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain.”
But yeah, his answer to the question “How did you come up with this?” in the 2008 article I linked to in the original post seems misleading, because he doesn’t mention Moravec at all and implies that he came up with the idea himself.
I haven’t read Moravec’s book very thoroughly, but I ctrl+f’d for “simulation” and couldn’t see anything very explicitly discussing the idea that we might be living in a simulation. There are a number of instances where Moravec talks about running very detailed simulations (and implying that these would be functionally similar to humans). It’s possible (quite likely?) Bostrom didn’t ever see the 1995 article where Moravec “shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious.”
Either way, it seems true that (1) the idea itself predates Bostrom’s discussion in his 2003 article, (2) Bostrom’s discussion of this specific idea is more detailed than Moravec’s.
Bostrom (2003) cited Moravec (1988), but not for this specific idea—it’s only for the idea that “One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain.”
But yeah, his answer to the question “How did you come up with this?” in the 2008 article I linked to in the original post seems misleading, because he doesn’t mention Moravec at all and implies that he came up with the idea himself.