A few years ago, while researching for a virtual reality (VR) program at MIT that I would be running, I put on a VR headset and played a game of ping-pong. The game was so realistic that it momentarily fooled my brain. When he finished, I instinctively tried to put the palette on the “table” and lean on it. Of course, the table did not exist and I almost fell. It was so easy to trick my senses into thinking the virtual world was real that I started thinking about what would happen to humanity if we continued to develop this technology.

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Simulation Hypothesis, in which I outlined the 10 stages of technological development that would take us to the Point of Simulation, where we will not be able to distinguish our virtual worlds from the physical one…