Pangram verdict · v3.3
We believe that this text is a mix of AI and human-written content.
AI likelihood · overall
AIArticle text · 829 words · 10 segments analyzed
I spent four decades assuming that simulating everything meant writing the rules for everything. Then machines began to learn what the world looks like. The screen turned white. I began to wonder what else I could change. I’ve been coding since I was 6. I’m 47 now. That’s practically my whole life. It all started with the same fascination of someone who teaches their dog tricks. For months I had a Commodore 64 that I used to play games, which at that age was roughly equivalent to owning a portal to another dimension but only using it to look at the scenery. Then my father brought me a magazine, K64, and I remember it looked boring at first. Too much text, no pictures. A piece of code here and there. The kind of thing you’d flip past looking for the game screenshots and never flip back.
Until one afternoon, I gave it a try and for the first time typed something different than the usual LOAD. I typed: POKE 53281, 15 Then the background became white. Now.
There is a particular feeling that humans get when they discover they can alter the fabric of their reality, even if that reality is a Commodore 64 connected to a television set in Argentina. It is the same feeling, I suspect, that the first person to discover fire had, except they probably didn’t immediately try to change the fire’s colour.
I did. I felt like a god. IF I > 10 THEN POKE 646, 2 And what is this sorcery? I can define my own rules? Something happens only when I say so?? I felt like a god on steroids.
Which, to be fair, is a redundant thing to say. Gods presumably don’t need steroids. But I was six, and the background was white because I told it to be white, and the precise theological implications of the moment were not my primary concern. Since then, although far too young to understand the scale of my own question, I wondered how far could this go. Could you even define all the rules of the world in a program? Not just the wall collisions of Pac-Man or the centripetal force of Pole Position. I mean all of it. Not a game. Not a rendering. The whole thing. Every blade of grass bending under wind that itself obeyed fluid dynamics equations that themselves emerged from pressure differentials computed at molecular resolution. The light refracting through a glass of water. The water having surface tension. The glass being made of silica with the correct crystalline structure. The table holding the glass being affected by gravity. The gravity being a consequence of mass curving spacetime, which… listen, you get the idea.
To simulate a glass of water, how much of the universe do you have to account for? As programming became an almost all-time hobby in the years that followed (it would have been an all-time hobby if it wasn’t that I had to attend school, which I considered a serious design flaw in the structure of childhood), I realised the answer to my question was: a lot of code. An almost inconceivable amount.
But the important thing, the thing that kept me up at night, was that it was theoretically possible. You would just need someone (or something) patient enough to write every rule, every if statement, every physical law, and then a computer powerful enough to run all of them simultaneously, in real-time, forever. Then, twenty years later, The Matrix screened on theaters. It blew my mind like being the kid who had spent years trying to explain something to everyone at school and then a stranger walks in and says it better in one sentence. There it was. Everything I’d been turning over in my head since the Commodore, projected onto a cinema screen.
Throwing the answer at me like nothing. “Of course”, I facepalmed myself, “We need machines to do it for ourselves. Humans can’t and won’t ever be able to write such complexity, but machines can.” Back then, of course, thinking machines would write code, or even yet, build full applications, was laughable like seeing Boomers believe we would have flying cars in the 2000s. Then, another twenty years later, we saw the rise of LLMs generating code. We now live at a time where AI agents code an entire application from a conversation.
Taking the time to think through implementation details has become the kind of meticulous craft that people speak of in the same tone they use for calligraphy or blacksmithing: with great respect and absolutely no intention of doing it themselves.
“So, this is it”, I guessed. “Now it’s a matter of memory and computing power. Machines writing the infinite codebase.” The ultimate if statement authored not by a person but by a process. We were almost there. But I was wrong. Not about the destination. About the road. Somewhere in the noise, there might be a world.