The idea that we are living in a Matrix-like simulation is hardly new. Plato created an interesting scenario where "a group of prisoners spend their lives chained up in a cave and gaze upon its wall while, unbeknownst to them, guards project images cast by shadows, which the prisoners mistake for the true reality," relates UnHerd's Zachary Hardman.
The concept of simulated reality is more relevant today than it ever has been. Over the next two or three decades, the simulated world will mimic the real world so precisely that it will make reality a redundant component of our existence. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dempsey says that within the next decade, we will be unable to distinguish fake images from real ones.
This will allow Hollywood to make movies and TV programs without flesh-and-blood actors. Marketing firms will be able to create campaigns using imaginary influencers.
The left (or right) could create the perfect digital politician who says exactly what people want to hear. "When artificial intelligence can even do the jobs of remote, digital workers, then the simulated reality will have become self-sufficient, a world completely unto itself," writes Hardman.
The difference between living in this simulation and The Matrix is that we aren't being kept in the dark about what reality truly is.
Hardman has a particularly dystopian view of this future.
Meanwhile, the real world comes to resemble what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “the disquieting strangeness of the desert." Bereft of the bustle of commerce and conversation, city centres are bought up by ghost-like foreign investors and turned into lifeless mausoleums through which tourists wander.
The earth itself becomes a fuel station to power the simulated world. According to MIT, by 2028 artificial intelligence could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of US households. Swamped by contextless information — the news feed and the reel — we cannot root ourselves. Culture withers. The new cannot burst forth. Everything is repeated in what philosopher Byung Chul-Han calls “the inferno of the same."
This future did not suddenly appear with the advent of artificial intelligence. "Socialist realism" in art and architecture gives us the "inferno of the same." We're seeing city centers emptied of people and businesses. This "desert" of hollowed-out downtowns was trending even before the pandemic, which only accelerated it.
Our best hope to avoid this kind of simulated existence is to learn how not to use AI. Artificial intelligence is the most seductive force to tempt humanity since social media got its hooks into us. How easy it will be to stop thinking and allow AI to write for us, summarize for us, decide for us.
We humans are born lazy. Think of how much human ingenuity goes into inventing stuff that makes our lives easier, less stressful, with less thinking and less work. We let apps plan our day, find a mate, and give us suggestions on what to eat and how to make love.
When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge and were banished by Yahweh from paradise, they severed the primal connection between humanity and the world. “Man”, Yahweh says to the angelic host, “has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”. This was the Fall. But perhaps it is unfinished. Perhaps, in our endless desire for useful knowledge, we have much further to go. Yet even in their despair, Adam and Eve were not hopeless. According to a Jewish myth, when, on the night of their banishment, they saw the sinking sun, they believed the world was returning to its primordial chaos because of their fault. Then the new dawn broke.
I won't be around to see it. But I've seen enough to know that we don't need "The Machines" to put us in a simulated reality.
We're doing a darn fine job all by ourselves.
