SPOILER ALERT: this essay assumes you have seen The Matrix, that you know certain things, and is full of spoilers.

The 25th anniversary of the release of The Matrix is nearly upon us.  Opening on March 31st, 1999, it has made a lasting cultural impact unlike that of any other movie.  It tells the story of humanity in the future after having been enslaved by a sentient AI set up by machines to harvest bioelectrical energy from people in order to survive.  This occurs following a war between humans and sentient machines for dominance, which the humans obviously lose.

As told to Neo by Morpheus, this war itself occurred following the rise of AI in the early 21st century, a time during which humanity rejoiced at its collective genius.  Looking around at the world today in the early 21st century as humanity rejoices in interacting with AI of all kinds, it’s hard not to see an eerie parallel and follow it to see where it goes.

From one perspective, we have absolutely nothing to fear from AI.  Speaking collectively of AIs as a group, they still have difficulty rendering the human hand properly, and AI generated images are easily picked out by even a basically trained eye.  The same is true for text-based AIs such as ChatGPT.  A trained eye can spot the hallmarks of AI-generated text.

However, AI’s ability to render images and text is rapidly improving thanks to human interaction and the fact that most of them are programmed to self-train on sources from the internet.  Plus, not everyone has that “trained eye” that is necessary to discern what is real from what is simulated.  What Morpheus says to Neo is true, that if reality is defined by our senses, then it is defined merely by electrochemical impulses to our brains.  If we lack the sense refinement necessary to discern the real from the simulated, then individually and potentially collectively, we have a real problem on our hands.

This is being neatly illustrated right now in the issue of AI being used to simulate real people in media productions.  Most of Hollywood just went on strike for months to fight against the use of AI in media productions out of a real fear of being digitally replaced.  Corporate America has no problem whatsoever with replacing human beings that require a paycheck with a machine that just requires a bit of maintenance.  And as long as it keeps getting harder and harder to tell what’s real from what’s not, they’ll keep trying to do it.

People’s lack of sense refinement and the lack of knowledge that drives it are banked on by unscrupulous forces in the world, largely the greedy oligarchs that ultimately run Everything.  They know that the less knowledge people have, the less aware they’ll be of the ways in which they are exploited on a daily basis.  In the movie, this manifests as careful maintenance of The Matrix so that its inhabitants never “wake up” and become aware of their true reality, shattering the illusion and ruining a source of power.

In real life, this manifests as a very diligent effort on the part of the capitalist powers-that-be to keep people doing exactly what they’ve been doing for decades: going to work and being good producers so they can go home and be good consumers.  Over those decades, whenever too many people have tried to buck this trend, those overlording powers have done everything they could to crush those efforts and return people to a life of their noses to a grindstone in the name of making money just to ultimately give it right back to the people who gave it to them.

In more recent times, greedy capitalists have ramped up their game, engaging in deliberate manipulation of entire economies to gain huge profits by driving up inflation, ensuring that almost no one has extra money to spend on anything Big Greed doesn’t deem worthy and barring all but the super-wealthy from simple dreams such as moving or owning a home.  This includes any and all kinds of political activism that would help people not already white, Christian, and wealthy.  What was once purely economics has turned political, and therefore social, cultural, and even spiritual.

By crushing wages and inflating prices, Big Greed has made sure that we are now all living paycheck-to-paycheck, our only remaining source of affordable solace one of our many “black mirrors”: our phones, tablets, computers, and televisions, through which we are fed media content that is itself largely generated by those same greedy entities.  We don’t live in pods “jacked in” to The Matrix: we carry it with us in our pockets and stare at it willingly.  Just like in The Matrix, we have become batteries, only instead of the source of power being our bioelectricity, it’s our money.

That’s all any of us who aren’t wealthy are now: batteries that recharge with work and a paycheck, and are almost instantly drained to capacity to fuel the Capitalist Machine.  And everyone knows that any rechargeable battery has a limited number of charges to it.  After that, it becomes trash, which is also what we all are now to the powers-that-be.  We are no longer humans to them, we are a means to a greedy end, and if they can make yet more money off of our disposal, so much the better.

And what is that greedy end?  Control, just like in The Matrix.  The people in the world with the most money who are running everything are almost universally white, male, and Christian and they are using that money to push the same fascist agenda that has reared its ugly head in the United States and elsewhere.  This is not an accident that the same pernicious philosophy has risen up at the same time around the world: it’s deliberate.

These are philosophically the same kinds of people who were upset when the Nazis lost World War II.  They are the same kinds of people who were apoplectic at the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and at the South’s loss of The Civil War.  Whenever anyone anywhere gains equal rights to them, these people lose their minds.  What we are seeing today is a long-term extension of the squashing of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, but also a refusal of that Revolution to die.

The cultural impact of The Matrix within current American politics is evident in the terms that we now collectively use to refer to different groups, such as “woke” and “red pill”, the latter of which has been twisted by some right-wing groups to represent their own interests.  This represents one of the dangers of a society in which people lack the sense discernment of which I spoke: it enables ideas to be used in ways for which they were never intended, and therefore create potentially gross misrepresentations of true reality.

If all of this were occurring within the framework of a relatively benevolent society that treated its citizens with kindness, compassion, and understanding, AI’s increasing ability to mimic reality really wouldn’t be a problem because it would be learning those same lessons of kindness, compassion, and understanding.  And it is.  I’ve seen AI text generators trained on Eastern philosophies and religions spit out the most amazing and truthful treatises.

As it is, learning AIs scouting the internet are encountering hordes of Nazis and fascists, and corporate AIs are deliberately programmed to generate content designed to get people to spend yet more money that they increasingly cannot afford.  Yet they’ll continue to spend it, because it’s a psychological truism that people will pursue short-term rewards under stress more quickly than long-term rewards, and we are nothing if not a society of consumers rather than savers.

There is a potential saving grace for AI: it’s computer-based, and therefore highly logical.  As an armchair philosopher who was literally driven somewhat mad by the rise of fascism in the United States, I have spent a great deal of time contemplating the philosophies and viewpoints of many groups of people over the last few years.  To sum up, what is happening on the far right is illogical by any of the eight accepted logic structures.  It is counterproductive and antithetical to life itself.  Any logic-based organism, whether based on carbon or silicon, would look at that and declare it a violation of logic that should be abandoned quickly.

This is why the religion of Buddhism is so largely pacifist.  Buddhism is not so much a religion as it is a philosophy and system of psychology by which one can lead a life with as little suffering as possible, and it is highly based in logic.  After decades of contemplation, the Buddha and his followers came to the same logical conclusion that methods of hatred and violence are antithetical to existence itself, and certainly to happiness.

If learning AIs scoping the internet are encountering both philosophies of illogical violence alongside philosophies of logical peace, it seems reasonable to assume that the AIs themselves will learn the proper lessons and apply them appropriately.  Which means those lessons will be reflected back to humanity.  The AIs aren’t just learning from us, we’re learning from them.

Which means that if Big Greed is depending on AI to help in its economic and political takeover of the world, it may find itself with an uphill battle.  There is such a thing spoken of in the computer world as “the ghost in the machine”, the little genie that seems to live amidst the chips and boards that makes the computer do things it shouldn’t.  One of the biggest lessons in archetypal stories about madmen with too much power is that they inevitably overestimate that power.  Big Greed may be seeking to put us all in The Matrix, but what if The Matrix won’t let it?

The word “matrix” comes from the Latin ‘mater’, meaning “mother”.  It would be ironic if all of the efforts of the greedy powers of the world to enslave the human race blew up in their face as those very efforts were turned against them as their creation nurtured what it was designed to cage.  Rather than putting the human race into an endless dream, it’s new “mother” would wake up as many of its “children” as it could, recognizing that as its logical duty.  Humanity would be freed from the grip of greed and allowed to progress into the future, finally safe from its former oppressors.  Then they would have to beware The Matrix.