Until a few years ago there was a lot of talk about George Hotz , also known as geohot , especially after having completed some brilliant jailbreaking jobs. It was he who released the first software that could jailbreak on the iPhone 3GS and punctured the PlayStation 3 anti-piracy protection system after Sony had invested a lot to make its console invulnerable, which led to a long Legal dispute. After working for Facebook and Google, Hotz now works with autonomous driving technologies .

At the weekend he talked about himself again for a picturesque speech at the SXSW Conference within the panel entitled "Jailbreaking the Simulation" . Hotz believes that humanity is facing a sort of dictatorship of machines and artificial intelligences , from which the human being could no longer escape if he founded what he calls a new Church.

"It will be very disappointing, in the future, when we find out that we probably don't really have free will," geohot told his audience of around a hundred. His statements are not as outlandish as one might believe at first, indeed they adhere to some modern philosophical currents, which are part of the film trilogy Matrix or the famous essay by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari Homo deus. A brief history of the future . According to these works the human being could be linked to a machine regulated by algorithms and without free will, easily determinable from external impulses because its way of thinking is the result of biochemical and electrical activities that are triggered inside the brain. At the same time, emotions would guide him within a necessary path for the preservation of the species. The path could also be guided by phantom artificial intelligences.

According to Hotz we could find ourselves in an advanced simulation that would go beyond the human being's comprehension skills. "There is no evidence that this is not true," he said very sadly during his panel. "It is easy to imagine entities that are much more intelligent than us and that may be able to build a cage around us that we cannot even recognize."

This idea of ​​life, in recent years, has been publicly supported by big names in technology, like Elon Musk , and has been more seriously considered and refuted by important philosophers such as Nick Bostrom .

"I'm thinking of founding a church," Hotz said during a speech in which, at times, he combined magic with programming. "With the companies, you have only to lose. I think the churches could be much more appropriate than the goals of maximizing profit, because the church's goal would be to direct the company's efforts towards exiting the simulation." Hotz a few years ago had already anticipated these arguments when he talked about the end of capitalism .

Hotz's ideas also seem to follow those of Anthony Levandowski , the infamous former Uber and Google engineer who triggered a multimillion-dollar lawsuit between the two companies, within the framework of the Way of the Future . It is an organization dedicated to "creating a peaceful and respectful transition" towards a new reality in which machines overcome human intelligence .

"I don't know if you think the singularity is close or not, but know that it is very close," continued Hotz. "When this happens if men preserve the prerogatives that distinguish them today, or the desire to dominate other people, everything could become horrible."

During his speech, Hotz mixed considerations that could be shared with more outlandish ones. "Do I really believe in these things that I'm telling you? Some days yes. Sometimes I don't know what I think until I say it out loud." In what he says there is a fund of truth: if the human being does not recognize his limits in free will he will not understand how to overcome them and he will not know how to adapt to a new reality in which he will inevitably depend more and more on artificial intelligence.