The Matrix is Coming for Us

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A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation … A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.

With this definition of cyberspace, we can trace the starting point of our journey toward the matrix. William Gibson published his novel Neuromancer in 1984, in which he created the above definition. Back then, Tim Berns-Lee, the father of the world wide web, was still thinking of a way to harness the potential of the internet as a global resource for digital management and dispensation of information. 

It would take Berns-Lee till 1990 to complete his code for the world wide web and release it to the public, forever standardizing Html, HTTP, and URL as the ‘it’ protocols. For nearly two decades, it would remain a flat, two-dimensional web with clunky yet working ways of interacting across geographical and information domains. Yet, Gibson was able to visualize the way of the future, just by watching the complete immersion of arcade players in their games and by hearing the intranet nerds wax lyrical about the newly birthed tech in the early 80s. 

Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding …

By the end of the century, the Wachowskis ran away with the Neuromancer’s description of the matrix quoted above. They were able to visualize it both as a digital architecture of code at its base level and as a user-end massive, role-inhabiting virtual world. The shared hallucination aspect of their matrix was how the code is designed to create a richly inhabited, yet familiar world in the users’ minds that is vicariously gratifying for nearly all of their needs. 

There had been enough development in the user-end applications of the internet by then. Emails, instant messengers, weblogs, listservs, Google, and the proliferation of internet cafes busier than the arcade lounges back then had shown the public’s obsession with the internet was not a fad. The Internet was already becoming a part and parcel of the lives of people who were applying its tools in new ways every day.

Massively multiplayer online games were coming to the fore with the most literal interpretation of the matrix in real life, albeit in the gaming world. The gaming arcade systems called Virtuality by the Virtuality Group had already created virtual worlds that allowed users to dive in not unlike The Matrix movies. These games, of course, depended on the technology of Virtual Reality that had been in development for far longer than the internet, rather than on the cerebral plugging-in system shown to connect to the matrix in both Neuromancer and The Matrix. 

Such gaming, however, never became as popular as the internet, nor as much as the massive, multiplayer role-playing games, which were more interactive rather than immersive. This was a foreshadowing of the next era of the world wide web that was about to be ushered in with Steve Job’s invention of the iPod and iPhone.

It is hard to believe that Steve Jobs unveiled the world’s first iPhone only thirteen years ago in 2007. Together, smartphones, the cloud, and social media have changed the way people live and work. Businesses, medicine, research, recreation, and personal communication are all heavily interwoven with the internet now. With the upcoming 5G networks that will allow the Internet of Things to become a reality, the internet will jump from the digital world and be alive in our homes. Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant have already given us a taste of how that would look like. Still, all of that is not quite the same as stepping into and walking around in the matrix ala Case or Neo. But that may not be too far off in the future either.

Ready Player One – both the book and the movie – showed us the dystopian version of what a population conditioned more to the virtual than the physical reality may look like. Walking down the streets with contraptions strapped onto their bodies to allow the transition to VR, they look like a zombie crowd. Except, instead of being flesh-eating zombies, they have given over their souls to the need to find immersive pastimes so they don’t have to confront the disappointing reality of their world anymore.  

The current focuses of the developers of virtual reality technologies, other than gaming, seem to be limitless and profound. In the military, VR simulations are used to train soldiers in such complicated combat situations in air, ground and the ocean which are impossible to recreate outside of virtual. In sports, similar applications have been developed to allow superior training opportunities to athletes.

There have been varied uses in the medical world. Mental health applications have seen the use of VR for exposure therapy, to allow patients to familiarize themselves with and take control of traumatic or triggering situations. Medical and dental students now use VR to practice complicated procedures and surgeries, allowing an upgrade to their skillsets during training that wasn’t quite possible before. VR-dependent learning platforms are also in development that will revolutionize learning technology and may also help sufferers of disabilities overcome some of the barriers in ordinary learning environments. 

The scariest development of VR in the works is straight out of a Matrix movie though. In his VR forecast for tomorrow’s internet surfing, the futurist David Tal writes: “By the end of the century, some people may go so far as to register at specialized hibernation centers, where they pay to live in a Matrix-style pod that cares for their body’s physical needs for extended periods—weeks, months, eventually years, whatever’s legal at the time—so they can reside in this metaverse 24/7.”

Gratefully, VR technology still hasn’t advanced to the point where such a scenario is the norm any time soon. However, the huge advances in the related augmented reality may achieve that result through a different route. AR technology focuses on merging the physical and the digital by creating digitally enhanced equipment that works or is used in the real world. Think interactive digital clothing, holographic cinema, and AR tech for the disabled. The applications of AR are even more extensive than VR due to greater integration with real-life situations.     

Spielberg’s Minority Report was the best illustration of what life could look like in an AR-dependent world. Don’t think all that hasn’t started happening already. In Switzerland, for example, people are inserting microchips the size of a rice grain under their thumbs to serve as their digital identities in lieu of keys and cash. There are so many requests that the manufacturer can hardly keep up with the demand.

Australia’s bionic eye is about to permit blind people to allow seeing again using impulses from their own eyes that tech helps transfer to the brain regions for vision. Elon Musk’s Neuralink promises to change the world by supplying functional brain implants to the masses to help treat any number of medical conditions. Recently, filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda showed how such an experience could feel like for real, through his brilliant short Hyper-Reality. Throw in deep machine learning AI-robots in this potent mix and it’s a different world altogether.

The enthusiasm of engineers and scientists circles back to a white monoculture. The VR/AR enhancement of life will only increase the gaps between segments of human society. The great advancements for learning, social, and physically disabled may speak for themselves. But who will drive the politics of supply versus demand, cost versus benefits, or hard-won gains in impossible-seeming fronts versus an increasingly ravaged planet?

Will the stark differences of a tech-enhanced lifestyle only drive the wedge deeper between, say, the privileged and the marginalized, or the conservatives and the progressives? Would the developers and manufacturers ever really stop to think before they leap? If all these advancements are an experiment on humanity, who is accountable if results backfire in strange, unpredictable ways a decade later? What about the cost of the environmental imprint? We know the production and maintenance of intrusive and pervasive digital networks have a direct effect on the earth’s atmosphere.

With a pandemic raging and massive fires besieging the continents every year, should we stop to think if blind, discriminating, and possibly dehumanizing progress should even be the real goal of science?

It seems that the adrenalin rush of ambition and achievement, and that age-old thing about humans conquering nature, is gonna keep driving the hare of technology well beyond the steady but slower turtles of caution.

Prepare for an evolution unlike we have ever gone through before. The matrix, like it or not, is coming for us.