'We're all cyborgs living in a simulated reality': Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk makes freaky claim

When Elon Musk is not actively planning ways to create colonies on Mars and finding high speed rail transport models, he also ruminates on everything from artificial intelligence turning humans into cats and whether all of human life is in fact, a video game.

The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, who's also involved in numerous other projects including SolarCity and OpenAI, recently spoke at the annual Code conference organised by Recode, a news technology website that reports on Silicon Valley.

In the video above, Musk answers a question about simulated reality: "I have had so many discussions about simulation, it's crazy." According to the inventor, the strongest probability of humans being in a simulation is the advancements in video game technology over the last forty years.

Musk says that we have came from a game like Pong, with two rectangles and dot, to very real 3D games that multiple people around the world can play simultaneously. Keeping in mind these things, he argues, "The probability that we are in a base reality is one in one billion. We should hope that is true because if civilisation stops at some point..." "We could reboot it," completes Walt Mossberg, co-founder of Recode. Were The Matrix and Douglas Adams right after all?

Here, Musk talks about a device that he might consider working on, if no other inventor thinks of doing it: neural lace. Neural lace?

It's a device most commonly used in science fiction, and can be implanted into the brain to make integration between the biological and technological world seamless. For someone like Musk, who is very sceptical and often fearful of the role that artificial intelligence might have in our futures, a device like this could help humans keep up – a hypothetical third digital layer above the cortex that works symbiotically with the human brain.

But we are already cyborgs, Musk reminds us. "You have a digital version, a partial version of yourself online in the form of your emails and social media, and all those things. And you basically have superpowers with your computer and your phone and all the applications that are there."

Musk aims to put people on Mars by 2025 where, he hopes, we will have a direct democracy and the crowd suggests that he should be "King of Mars," although that would make it a monarchy.

But even inventors like Musk find what they do overwhelming. On asked about his failure to meet deadlines, Musk tells the crowd that every time they try inventing and creating something, there is a lot of new technology to deal with – things that they had not foreseen earlier.

Here is the full interview.