Matrix movie — review & AI approach
What is real and what is not; how could we even know it? The movie Matrix makes everyone who sees it question that.
The concept “Matrix” is defined by Morpheus, who is the character representing the one who awakes the “others”, as a “prison of the mind”. The movie is based on the idea that we can be characters living in a simulation when we look at it separately from the story which is the history of how we got there because of machines and our bad behaviors as human beings.
Since I want to skip the story part and focus on the philosophical view, I will not take the AI systems as robots in that movie but take humans instead. It is because humans represent just another type of AI if we take the World as a simulation and look at the frame from afar since in that case, humans are intelligent but also artificial from the perspective of the “creator”.
In my opinion, the idea behind the movie totally makes sense. In open World games, which humans created with technology and knowledge just since 1945, every object including characters have physical limits. Objects cannot pass through the walls, they fell down like there is a force downwards such as gravity, when you shoot someone in the head he/she dies, but the key point is, the characters do not know they are in a simulated World because their “minds” are limited (imprisoned in that case) too. The characters that are created with AI which we call “bots” can act like normal human beings but cannot question the World, how it first started, if it is real or not, is he/she real, and so on. All of these limitation-based fundamentals and rules are just the same as the ones in the movie Matrix.
However, these are all yesterday’s news. In the 21st century which we are living, AI got so much developed that I bet You cannot differ yourself distinctly from a sophisticated AI system in some cases. All of these happened just in 76 years if we take the beginning as ENIAC; 181 years if we take it as Lady Ada Lovelace’s idea of AI and it is nothing in comparison with human history. If we accept that there can be other forms of life, then we should also consider that they might have been developed a game which we call today our World. Also seeing math everywhere (such as golden ratio) -might be some sort of code or design pattern-, the fact that nothing can be faster than the speed of light -is a physical limit-, the fact that there cannot be any kind of thing smaller thank Planck -also is a physical limit- support the idea of a simulated World.
To sum up, there is no reason to think that it is impossible we are in a simulated world which is created by some sort of “programmer” and we are all some sort of AI systems such as described in the movie. To visualize of all these mentioned and much more, you can see the movie Matrix.
