Ask HN: In The Matrix, the bad guys are the 'agents'. Coincidence? Clairvoyance? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: In The Matrix, the bad guys are the 'agents'. Coincidence? Clairvoyance?

26 pointsspottedmarley20 comments

My buddy, Dario, says agents are getting more aggressive and will soon kill everybody, and I feel like I've seen this movie before.

View on HN

"Agent" was already established lingo in computer science and AI when The Matrix was released.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648203.749270

They were indeed. “Autonomous agents” were extremely trendy in CS 30 years ago.

https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/267658

Fun fact, you're browsing the web as fetched for you, and rendered in a way you find acceptable, by your user agent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

Better page specifically for user-agent in a browser context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent (although has a lot less content)

Besides Firefox, I don't think many of the browsers are user-agents anymore, but more like corporate-agents, as they don't seem to act in the interest of the software user anymore.

If you’re willing to consider the sequels part of the canon, Smith’s copying/cloning technique does kind of look like OpenAI’s approach to intellectual property.

"Do you like what I've done with the place?"

Agent is something that has been used in programming for ages, even before llms. It's simething you learn about in first years in CS

When my agents start referring to humans as a virus and AI as the cure, that's when I'll worry.

That would be too late by that point

You really can just type anything into the internet and have it exposed to the whole world.

Anonymous shallow replicas too. All the same program launched a million times.

'Bad guys' is debatable. It was the humans who scorched the sky

Wait until you hear about Tron

Fights for the user and against the MCP!

Ram also had a crisis there I think.

Dr. Walter Gibbs: [laughs] You've got to expect some static. After all, computers are just machines; they can't think.

Alan Bradley: Some programs will be thinking soon.

Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking, and the people will stop!

The Matrix wasn't a movie, it was a documentary.

“They all look the same to me”

Wait until you learn what the A in CIA stands for and what the stuff they dropped on Vietnam was called

Wait, what do you think the A stands for?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com