I have this waking nightmare of a kind of Matrix dystopia where we peasants, instead of laboring in fields and sacrificing our daughters to some disgusting duke or something will instead be ensconced in cubicles, 24/7, our brains wired into our entertainment devices which both keep us passive and sedated with seductive propaganda and also supply our overlords with all the necessary data to feed AI with human experience for whatever purpose it requires. A few years back a small armada of scientists asked itself the question: "What are the odds of all human perception being a simulation, a video game of sorts, created by gamers in our perceived future?"

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/10/18275618/simulation-hypothesis-matrix-rizwan-virk

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true:

1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities;

2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or

3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.

We can’t know for sure which of these is the case, Bostrom concludes, but they’re all possible — and the third option might even be the most probable outcome.