Hans Moravec
Roboticist: a simulated world is a real world like any other, because a world exists through its rules, not through the machine that runs it.
Life
Roboticist born in 1948 in Austria, a Canadian citizen, who made his career at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He worked on robot vision and navigation, and gave his name to "Moravec's paradox": what is easy for us, seeing or walking, is very hard for a machine, and the other way round. In his books he sees intelligent machines as our future descendants. He also argues that a simulated world is as real as ours.
Main works
Intelligent machines will be our "mind children" and could one day surpass humanity.
A simulated world is defined by its rules, like ours: it is no less real.
The stages through which robot intelligence could evolve, and what it would change for us.
In his own words
« The difference between physical and mathematical reality is an illusion of vantage point: the physical world is simply the particular abstract world that happens to contain us. »