[HN Gopher] Are we all trapped in The Matrix 25 years later?
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Are we all trapped in The Matrix 25 years later?
Author : aritraghosh007
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-03-24 09:36 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| peutetre wrote:
| > 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."_
| skywal_l wrote:
| > the peak of your civilization
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/7aGNei01fzQ?feature=shared&t=6290
| pstuart wrote:
| Perhaps a bit earlier, in 1971 where we all could drink Coke
| in harmony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msbfN81Gm0
| high_priest wrote:
| So many posts mention years '98 & '99 as the "peak of
| civilisation". Them being years of my birth, these mentions &
| my experiences, enforce in me the feeling that I was born
| into a falling civilisation.
|
| 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.
| spacebacon wrote:
| https://archive.is/QZzA9
| keiferski wrote:
| 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._
| cvwright wrote:
| I can't help but be reminded of my employer's favorite quote
| from Dune:
|
| > 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.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Or as the old zine In Formation put it, "Every day, computers
| are making people easier to use." [1]
|
| 1: https://twitter.com/davidtemkin/status/1028129852895813632
| ?l...
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| There's also a more comedic take on that theme from SMBC:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3576
|
| (Spoilers ahead) I actually like the comic very much since it
| seems much more plausible than Terminator-like doomsday
| scenarios. AGI might not need to conquer humanity; we might
| simply become too lazy and dependent on it to bother to
| maintain our own agency and thus doom ourselves.
| twojobsoneboss wrote:
| 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
| squigz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| JohnBrookz wrote:
| 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.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| I've always wondered how many truly unique brains are active at
| any given moment. How many words are parrots vs source?
| nojs wrote:
| 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.
| kromem wrote:
| 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.
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