NPCs around us?

I was reading this article from @kennyskitchen since he linked it in one of his recent posts, and there are similar ideas to those I have been having for a long time.

First off, I think it is important to define what is an NPC:

A non-player character (NPC), also known as a non-playable character, is any character in a game that is not controlled by a player. In video games, this usually means a character controlled by the computer via predetermined or responsive behavior, but not necessarily true artificial intelligence | Source

Surely every one of us has been in a situation where we encounter a certain person whose actions seems to lack meaning, and they might even have an attitude that could be seen as illogical.

If at some points in our lives we have talked with someone whose arguments, answers and reasoning were lacking not just logical sense but meaning itself, like if we were talking with any virtual assistant like Alexa or Siri, then we could see that person as someone who is not necessarily “real”.

The universe, despite its apparent chaos, can be seen as a machine or structure designed to optimize resources and reduce waste as much as possible, like any well designed system.

Populating planets with billions of intelligent beings must certainly be expensive and require a lot of resources, and even more when there is a percentage of them living their lives with complete inner freedom, allowing them to ponder about things other people would never do. On the other hand, placing only that percentage of people on a huge planet would make them miserable, lonely, and cause them to have depression.

The solution is, therefore, very simple: a percentage of the world population is real people, and the rest are sort of bots, a virtualization, a huge group of beings with reduced autonomy, whose purpose is to give sense to the plot that is permanently being unfolded, and serve as company for that percentage of real humans, as well as being part of the scenery, furnishings of the world. They are part of the tool that was employed to create the script and sort of direct the story of the “real” humans, they are literally like the NPCs we can find in any video game.

Anyone who begins to think about this might start to wonder about a lot of things, like which ones of our relatives and friends could be a NPC and which one a real person, however distinguishing real people from those who aren’t shouldn’t be very hard, it is very similar as recognizing a virtual assistant and knowing it isn’t an actual person, only this time we need to be much more meticulous because the differences would be very subtle,

Nevertheless, it is possible that right now someone might be thinking that he of course, is a real person, feeling completely confident after reading this article, but not even stopping to ask himself if he indeed is real or not, and in fact, this text can even make him a little bit nervous.

And if this person perhaps has a feeling of rejection towards these thoughts, who knows, those feelings might be designed to prevent him from asking himself this question in the first place.

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Final thoughts

This article is based on the assumption that in order to run any simulation, it wouldn’t make sense to over-spend any processing resources there might be, and reducing the amount of intellectual work of a considerable amount of individuals and make them sort of “generic” could be one of several strategies to allow everything to go smoother.

I hope you find this post entertaining, and feel free to share your own thoughts about this.