“Sim City 3D”

About the work

A few years back, the philosopher Nick Bostrom made the case that we're living in a simulation. The argument runs like this: if we assume there are countless civilisations out there in the cosmos, and that several of them are running simulations of worlds with self-aware beings, then there must be far more simulated universes than real ones — because there can only be one real universe, while there can be countless simulated ones, each of which can spin up new simulations of its own. And if that's true, the odds that we happen to be sitting in the real one are vanishingly small. Our beloved astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, for one, reckons the probability is overwhelming that we're inside one of the simulations.

But the idea that we're living in a simulation is nothing new. Nearly two and a half thousand years ago, Plato turned the thought over and gave us the allegory of the cave. In the story, people sit chained together with their backs to a fire. Their entire world is the shadows the fire throws, dancing on the cave wall. But one day, one of them breaks free of his chains and walks out of the cave and into the world. Out there he sees reality for what it truly is, and he hurries back to tell the others — who don't believe a word of it, and stay put in the cave.

And it isn't only us in the West who've doubted reality. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who lived around the same time as Plato, dreamt one night that he was a butterfly — and when he woke, he couldn't be sure whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, or the other way round.

For this visualisation of a simulated world, we took the Monopoly board as our starting point — a metaphor for just how unfair this simulation really is. Because we aren't born onto an empty board. People have been playing Monopoly for thousands of years, so every property is already taken, and there are houses and hotels everywhere. Some are born with a head start and a silver spoon, inheriting a house or a whole hotel. Others get a far harder start — a mother lost to drugs, or some other great weight to carry through life.

In Norway we're lucky to have high social mobility — that is, a decent chance of climbing up through the socioeconomic layers if you're born in the bottom ones, and the reverse too. A sharp contrast to places like the US, India or Dubai, where you're more or less locked into the layer you were born into.

But to climb, you have to play the game cleverly. You have to know which rules are in force. Some are written down, like the ones in the Bible or Norwegian law; others are unwritten, like which tasks at work you actually have to do and which you can safely not give a damn about. The written ones can send you straight to hell or land you in prison — and there are enormous differences in how likely a conviction is. If you were born good-looking, say, your odds of ending up behind bars are far lower than if you weren't. And if you're a Black man in the US, the odds are one in three that you'll be locked up at some point in your life. For a Latino it's one in six; for a white man, one in twenty.

And if you ever do get caught by the police — for pulling off a break-in with a friend, say — there's a worked-out strategy for landing the smallest possible sentence, and that strategy turns out to explain a great deal about the behaviour of both people and animals. In game theory, there's a famous experiment called the "prisoner's dilemma." It asks for the best strategy when you and your friend are hauled in, put in separate interrogation rooms, and each asked to rat the other out. There are four possible outcomes. Both of you snitch: you each get three years. Both keep quiet: you each get one year. But if one of you snitches while the other stays silent, the snitch walks free and the other gets five years on bread and water. When you've no idea what your friend is doing — or how good a friend they really are — the maths says snitch, because that gives you the best shot at the least time inside. But play this game a few hundred times over, and a very different tactic pulls ahead as the clear winner.

To find the best strategy, maths professor Steven Strogatz at Cornell University built a simulated tournament. He invited mathematicians and other game theorists to design different strategies, then pitted them against one another in a simulation. The strongest strategies are the ones that start out by keeping quiet, but snitch if the other player snitched on them the round before. And the very best strategy adds a 10% forgiveness rate — one time in ten it declines to snitch back, even though the other player betrayed it last round. This carries over powerfully to the "real" world, and it's one of the reasons I think people are kinder in small places than in big cities: they're simply playing the prisoner's dilemma more often with the same people, and so they've far more to gain from being good to one another.

So what's the goal in this game we're all playing? Is it money and property, like in Monopoly? Is it love, self-realisation, or reaching God in the kingdom of heaven? Whatever your "mission" happens to be, one thing above all raises your odds of pulling it off: information. Know your partner's love language, and you improve the chances your relationship works. Have an inside tip, and you can clean up on the stock market. Know your own strengths and weaknesses, and you can go far by playing to them. And if you know the Bible by heart, well — God's going to be damn impressed.

But do you actually have any control over your own life in this simulated game? How can you know you're the "main character," and not just a bit-part in someone else's story? And how can you know you're not simply an AI dreaming she's Plato, dreaming he's a butterfly, dreaming it's you?

Either way, you've got to play the cards you were dealt as best you can — and if you buy this picture, you'll be holding some damn good cards.