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Are we all trapped in The Matrix 25 years later?

by aritraghosh007 on 3/24/24, 9:36 AM with 50 comments

  • by peutetre on 3/24/24, 9:49 AM

    > Agent Smith: "Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at it’s beauty, it’s genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time."

  • by keiferski on 3/24/24, 3:22 PM

    One thing I’ve noticed with AI tools is that many people are entirely willing to offload the thinking process to the machine. They don’t use it as a way to enhance their capabilities or come up with new ideas, but just to do the work entirely. It reminds me of this line from Agent Smith:

    …which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.

  • by JohnBrookz on 3/24/24, 6:56 PM

    Maybe I’m surrounded by the wrong people, but even amongst my educated peers their opinions are regurgitated. Not even from an interesting author but what they’ve seen online or in mainstream culture.

    The only exception being my contrarian friend but his opinions aren’t any more intelligent, just different.

    Has this really been any different since the dawn of modern propaganda though? The only difference is now we use it to sell goods not just political ideas.

    I think the few who leave Plato’s cave on their own are far less than what we would like and those who remain will never truly be free. Their comfort lies in the cave.

  • by kromem on 3/24/24, 10:25 PM

    I always find it so interesting when people are eagerly ready to adopt The Matrix as metaphor for whatever they don't like, but are often vehemently against entertaining it as a literal concept.

    25 years ago I thought "that's neat" for a clever film twist. Much like the Sixth Sense. But then a few years later I read Nick Bostrom's op-ed in the NYT, and started considering the notion seriously.

    In the time since The Matrix we've shifted to a world where we've brought AI further than anyone thought it would be in their lifetimes with continued compounding gains, are using that tech to build virtual twins of ourselves and the world around us, and are even using AI to create dynamic agency and interactions within virtual worlds modeled off human thought processes.

    Meanwhile we are still struggling to piece together the shattering realization that while our universe behaves as if continuous at large scales that at low fidelity it converts to discrete units at the point of stateful interactions (and reversed if the state is lost, much like a memory efficient program might do). We just sort of shrug and say it's 'weird' but take it for granted as how the world works because we've grown up knowing that's the case. I sometimes wonder if Einstein would have been so reluctant to think the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it if he had hundreds of parallels in virtual skyboxes where exactly that thing is the case when thinking about it.

    We process time so linearly it can be hard to think about the future as prologue, but looking at the present relative to 25 years past and thinking about the future, it strikes me that the most preposterous concept in The Matrix was not the nature of its reality, but the notion that there were any bodies in pods somewhere to exit into.

    Still, I have no doubt that in another 25 years we'll continue to see it embraced as metaphor while rejected in a more literal interpretation, just in a world where it reflects even less fiction vs science than today.

    The irony is that AI agents in a virtual world, if correctly modeling human behavior, would also reject the same concept.

  • by twojobsoneboss on 3/24/24, 4:04 PM

    I have increasingly thought of this, how our current lives are ever more reminiscent of the matrix, being confined in our isolating community-less suburban “pods”, zombiefied on our phones, with no money or safety net to do much else, passing each day like the last

  • by hodgesrm on 3/25/24, 12:24 AM

    > But in a strange way, the film has become more relevant today than it was in 1999. With the rise of the smartphone and social media, genuine human interaction has dropped precipitously.

    This is an interesting comment, because reading a book involves interaction with a text rather than other human beings. Yet we consider that (for the most part) a beneficial thing even though reading a thick book is kind of like putting up a "do not disturb" sign.

    The problem is more that social media are extremely addictive. Users are more like Lotos Eaters [0] than inhabitants of Plato's cave.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus-eaters

  • by spacebacon on 3/24/24, 3:12 PM

  • by nojs on 3/24/24, 10:18 PM

    Random Matrix trivia: I recently discovered the “Adam Street bridge” where Trinity says “Because you have been down there Neo, you know that road, you know exactly where it ends” is the underpass right near central station in Sydney. So if you live in Sydney, that line is almost certainly true.

  • by scheeseman486 on 3/25/24, 3:17 AM

    The Matrix was about being trapped in a system.

    In the film, the technology of the Matrix isn't intrinsically viewed as a terrible thing. The people of Zion use it to learn, to train, for pleasure and for work. What they're really fighting against is those who control the Matrix, who are using it to exert control through orchestrated cycles of violence. The enemy isn't even AI itself, most of the artificial intelligences are as much a slave to the system as the humans are.

    Our failings aren't the fault of technology, though technology can exposes the failings in ourselves. It's easier to blame technology than people, though it's not like I don't relate. I've yelled at my computer before.

  • by squigz on 3/24/24, 4:45 PM