This is an interesting paper that discusses the chances that what we take for reality is "really" just a computer simulation. The most interesting quote for me was the last line: "Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."
Some rather hilarious media responses to the paper are available here: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
And other papers by Nick Bostrom here: http://www.nickbostrom.com/
And other papers by Nick Bostrom here: http://www.nickbostrom.com/
I finally read this and it's pretty awesome. A minor hole though:
Suppose I choose to assume that the people of the future will indeed spend some time simulating their ancestors. This doesn't mean that they will be using their simulations at random with no predictable criteria. His argument here is similar to saying that "if the universe is infinite in size, anything you can imagine must exist somewhere". On the contrary, an infinite universe could just be an endless repetition of the same couple of structures over and over. Similarly, while our descendants could have at their disposal a limitless amount of computing power, there is no reason to believe they would choose to waste it simulating a boring guy like me.