Elon Musk says we are probably characters in a video game

Elon Musk has revealed how deep into the matrix he believes we are at a technology and media conference in California.

The Tesla chief executive raised eyebrows at Recode's Code Conference by saying the human race is probably made up of characters controlled by an advanced civilisation.

Musk said games are on a trajectory to being indistinguishable from reality, so who's to say life as we know it is reality.

"The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.

"Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

"If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

"So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions."

When asked whether he believed this to be true, Musk simply replied: "There's a one in billions chance we're in base reality."