Are we all trapped in The Matrix 25 years later?
wsj.com
wsj.com
The more I think of it, the more I think this time was the actual peak of civilization (from a westerner's point of view). The Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Nagano in 98, when the world was singing the Ode to Joy was that peak moment for me [0]. After that, it went all downhill.
Not that I do not enjoy the vision of passing the stick from organic creatures, made by happenstance, to purpose built machines. But as a human, I do miss the endless opportunities of the 2000s chaos and I feel like they were better times than todays monitored, calculated, cold life under cameras & microphones.
All we can do is to try our best within the time we're allotted.
Edit: date
…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.
> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
1: https://twitter.com/davidtemkin/status/1028129852895813632?l...
(Spoilers ahead) I actually like the comic very much; it's too uncomfortably plausible that humans might simply become too lazy and dependent on AGI to bother to maintain our own agency and thus doom ourselves.
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.
Eventually she got a high paying, high stress high finance job and eventually she had no time to really think about things. Instead it was easier to repeat talking points she saw on the news and spend what little time she had enjoying her money. We still keep in touch but she actively isn’t interested in our old subjects as they’re too stressful to think about. It’s a fair point.
My coworker is reasonably decent engineer and intelligent person. His motivation in life is to just make money to feed his addiction to video games, gambling and drugs. We’re friends outside of work so I encouraged him to break away from his vices but to him there’s not much in the “real world”. It’s not entertaining, optimistic or fun so he plugs in after work.
I have a lot friends like these. The funny thing about the cave allegory is that in modern times the world outside of the cave is much more chaotic, hateful and scary.
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.
The movie producers realized the problem in later movies and added some mumbojumbo that they were keeping humans around for their neural networks, but that still requires the viewer to take it on faith.
I suppose it could just be a myth, but I always thought that was the original premise and it was hollywood execs who insisted on making the matrix about batteries on the assumption that audiences wouldn't understand the concept of neural networks.
see for example: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...
It's a myth. It was always batteries in the script, but when Neil Gaiman was hired to do a Matrix short story he added lines about using the humans as a neural network because he thought the battery thing was stupid. I've seen this well documented online so you should be able to find it if you try.
> 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.
If the reality you see isn't real, why would you assume computers are? It doesn't seem like a very philosophically sound position.
But to be honest my parents’ generation had the same issue. In the 80’s we had neighbors we knew. I was babysat by a neighbor
In the 90’s, we moved, and didn’t know a single neighbor, and we lived there for years. I always wondered why, but I guess it’s because everyone was caught up with their job or school and whatnot
Even in the 90’s my experience was that most people and families were pretty self sufficient. It obviously depends on the person and the area though
A lot of it has to do with suburban architecture, or lack thereof
We weren’t stuck on our phones though. It could be worse now though - I remember >10 years ago before or during the google glass thing, talking about how people would be literally in virtual worlds while riding the subway and so forth
That hasn’t happened, despite the efforts of many companies
This is also increasingly on my mind.
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.
It's also constantly adapting to divide us and incite fear and anger because doing that drives engagement and it's accessed through devices which are designed to do the same thing. No matter how much of a page turner a book is, it's not popping notifications, tracking your location, learning from your habits, spying on your environment, hitting you with distractions when it detects you're most vulnerable, and preying on your insecurities etc. Books are much less harmful than social media for a lot of reasons, even if they don't involve you being social. Some people even like to be semi-social while reading. They'll go to parks, coffee shops, or libraries to read around others.
Culture is the shade tree of reality.
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.
Clearly this "law" is for clickbaity potentially-but-not-likely factual headlines, not ones that are obviously to some extent metaphorical.
That's what I said!