The Netherlands - Avoid a future cataclysm: Forget the past - by Marcus Chown
Great news, there may be a way to avoid a looming disaster. All you need to do is forget all about it by "resetting" your memory. That's the claim of physicist Saibal Mitra at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and it is predicated on the existence of parallel universes. The "many worlds" concept is an interpretation of quantum theory - our best description of the microscopic world of atoms and their constituents. Many worlds takes literally quantum theory's idea that a quantum entity like an atom can exist in many states at once, and posits the existence of parallel universes containing infinite copies of you with different histories and futures. To understand how the many-worlds scenario could allow a future disaster to be avoided, says Mitra, consider a hypothetical machine intelligence that regularly backs up its memory. If it encountered a glitch, for example, it could reset its memory to, say, the previous day's state.
The downside of such memory resets, however, is that there is a small chance you will "wake up" in a universe facing an even more cataclysmic disaster than the one you were trying to dodge. "You'd have to weigh up whether it would be worth the risk," Mitra concedes. David Deutsch at the University of Oxford, whose work has lent mathematical support to the many-worlds idea, points out that conclusions based on the probabilities of outcomes in parallel universes will be speculative, and therefore suspects Mitra is wrong. However, he notes that "probability is not yet sufficiently well understood to say so definitively".
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