Matrix 4: these technologies predicted by the saga which materialize (or not)

Matrix, first of the name, was released in 1999. At the end of a crazy decade, marked by the arrival and then the democratization of the Internet and the web. At the time, our preoccupation with new technologies was the future bug of the year 2000, which risked freezing computers and leading to a mini-apocalypse. But aside from some sci-fi works, AI, virtual reality, and world simulation were definitely not things to think about.

Taking up the themes addressed in several novels and films of the genre released a few years or even decades earlier, such as Dark City, Total Recall, The Minority Report, Neuromancer, The Virtual Samurai (Snow Crash), Ubik, Terminator and 2001, the Odyssey of the n space, Matrix addresses the fantasy of the apocalypse caused by machines. In a film-synthesis, in cyberpunk, futuristic style and against a backdrop of electro music.

20 years later, when the 4th opus (The Matrix Resurrections) of the saga is released, it is clear that several predictions have come true, or seem about to be. We don't live in a simulation (though), but the first Matrix resonates strangely today. And some imagined technologies are no longer science fiction.

1. Virtual reality will simulate the world

The Matrix and its sequels depict a future where humans, enslaved by machines, live in a simulated world. An idea strongly inspired by Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998), a film where extraterrestrials experiment on us by making us live in a virtual city, with a different scenario every day. In The Matrix, machines create a virtual universe; not to conduct experiments, but to keep humans alive, which they use as power sources.

Millions of people connected in a simulated universe, where they have fun, work, consume, meet, coexist, interact... Doesn't this concept remind you of the "metaverse" concept that everyone has been talking about for several months ? Our smartphones are already tearing us away from our reality, and virtual reality (VR) headsets are gradually becoming more democratic. And now, the new fad of Silicon Valley is to make us swallow a blue pill to lead us into a virtual world.

In The Matrix, humans are unaware of living in the Matrix, and their skulls are wired to an invasive man-machine interface. In reality, we are still only at VR helmets, and these remain perfectible. It's hard to ignore the real world around us. But immersion is more and more efficient, and should be even more so in the years to come.

The technological fantasy of the metaverse, which dates back to the novels Simulacron (Daniel F. Galouye, 1964), Neuromancer (1984) and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1993), and found in Steven Spielberg's recent film, Ready Player One (2018), is also gradually taking shape. 18 years after Second Life, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg launched a beta version of Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social platform, in early December. His new company, Meta, and its subsidiary, Meta Quest (ex-Oculus) describe Horizon as an "ever-evolving universe in VR that you can explore and in which you can play, create and explore communities". Other companies, such as Disney and Microsoft, also design their own metaverses.

With Horizon, we are of course very far from a simulated world so real that we risk dying in real life if we were shot (virtually) on it, and where we could live indefinitely. We are also far from a simulation designed and controlled by an AI, with “agents” in suits and dark glasses who protect it weapon in hand. In our world, everything relies on humans, whose capitalist enterprises aim to make us spend money on a simple VR transposition of the web. And VR remains, once again, perfectible.

But at the same time, work has been done online since the Covid (Facebook / Méta has also created a “Horizon Workrooms” for this purpose), and meetings are increasingly virtual: uses are changing, and the virtual us seems more and more “practical”. So why not dive into it totally tomorrow, using it also for our social life? Until creating a "better" world than ours, like the blue pill in the Matrix?

2. Our brains can be connected to computers

In The Matrix, humans (synthetic, created by machines) are connected to the Matrix via the "headjack", a neural interface that attaches behind the skull, and which allows a "data probe" to be implanted there. They are used to “connect” them to the world simulated by the AI ​​that has taken control of the planet, but also to download / upload data and modify their memory. The resistance fighters, the “redpills”, also use it in a roundabout way to make their members more efficient and stronger.

In reality, there is no device that can download / upload data in the human brain, but there are already devices for interacting by thought with machines. The "man-machine interfaces", which are being developed by researchers all over the world, allow patients in particular to control artificial limbs or machines. The BrainGate system thus transforms quadriplegics into Jedi knights, by allowing them to control objects from a distance. A chip, implanted in the brain, converts the intention of the user into computer commands, intended for a computer. Thus, the disabled person can move objects by thought, turn on the light, surf the Internet or zap on his TV.

Other non-invasive brain interfaces (without implants, just by placing electrodes on the scalp), which are also called "non-invasive computer-brain interfaces" or "direct neural interfaces" (IND), allow people with disabilities to move their wheelchairs by thought. Miguel Nicolelis' "integral prosthesis" allows paraplegics to walk - by controlling exoskeletons, via nerve impulses picked up by electrodes placed on the skull.

Next step: Elon Musk's crazy, but increasingly concrete project, called Neuralink. The idea: “stick” tiny chips on our neurons, passing them through our veins, to establish a “neural link” with computers. The goal: to improve our memory, and allow us to direct electronic devices by thought. This technology would make it possible to restore cerebral and motor functions in the event of spinal cord injury, but also to couple it to an AI to “boost” the potential of our brain. To make us smarter.

According to Elon Musk, in the future, we may even one day use such technology to download and save our memories to a hard drive, or to upload new data for therapeutic or transhuman purposes. Will it also allow us to live fully in a virtual universe? So far, Neuralink's first implant, the N1 Link, has allowed a monkey to play Pong using only its brainwaves. And Elon Musk's medium-term goal remains to enable paralyzed people to surf, text, play video games, draw or write by thought. It is therefore still rather modest. But a step seems to have already been taken.

3. The human body can be used as a battery

In The Matrix, enslaved humans, the "bluepills", are wired to the Matrix until they die, in power plants. Because the machines mainly use it as a source of energy, for themselves and to continue to generate the matrix. An idea that seemed crazy in 1999. Except that recently, researchers in Colorado created a portable device that turns the human body into a neurobiological battery.

This invention, the Thermoelectric generator (TEG), can convert low-intensity heat into electricity. A TEG should eventually be able to be worn as a ring, a bracelet. Or be transposed into any accessory touching the human body. For the moment, it only generates a weak energy thanks to the internal temperature of its wearer; but already enough to power a small electronic device, such as a watch or a connected bracelet. In the future, we may thus be able to (re)charge our smartphones or our connected watches using the heat of our body. But we will have to be patient: the scientists behind the TEG think that their invention should only be marketed within 5 to 10 years.

4. AI will (or won't) be really smart

In 2021, however, we are very far from seeing the birth of a truly intelligent AI; intelligent to the point of supplanting us like in the Matrix.

Certainly, Facebook, Microsoft and Google are constantly making progress in AI. Those from Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind have become famous for their ability to master complex games like chess, shogi and Go, where they have come to dominate the best human players with advanced machine learning techniques. One of them even became the best in Starcraft. And Hanson Robotics prides itself on having created a larger-than-life humanoid robot, Sophia, capable of mimicking facial emotions and interacting with humans.

For Elon Musk, “with artificial intelligence, we invoke a demon”, because it is “potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons”. But in reality, we are still a thousand leagues from a “strong” AI, that is to say really intelligent; as opposed to the “weak” AI we use every day, which only relies on algorithms we design ourselves.

For Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, researcher at LIP6, the Paris 6 computer laboratory, artificial intelligence and robots endowed with intelligence and emotions “remain only a chimera”. There are certainly AIs capable of predicting natural disasters or diseases. But as experts point out, this is not real intelligence. The victory of Deep Mind programs in the game of go or chess “is impressive, but above all these programs benefit from great computing power. They are not intelligent”, says Jean-Noël Lafargue, expert in the history of technologies. Thus, “they don't know that they have won, nor that they are playing go or chess”.

Researcher at Inria in Nancy, Jean-Baptiste Mouret adds: “all we know how to do for the moment with deep learning is to recognize faces in a photo. We are very far from understanding how it would be possible to design a conscious computer. According to the scientist, “machines have the intelligence of a cockroach. And they understand the world around them less well than a 3-year-old child. They lack common sense, that experience that would allow them to understand things that are obvious to us... that we have to encode in them”.

As for the robot Sophia from Hanson Robotics, it is only a program, designed by humans, and what she says is really only a script. Sorry to shatter your illusions. It is not tomorrow that AI will sound the end of humanity. Or will just be “smart”. We will still have to wait a while.

Hod Lipson, robotics engineer and director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University in New York, told Fast Company magazine that “AI is bound to eventually surpass human capabilities in almost every area of ​​life… but probably in the next century”. If not in the next millennium?

5. We will eat artificial “superfoods”

In 1999, The Matrix showed us a post-apocalyptic future where humans who resist machines, like Neo, eat a kind of molasses that contains "everything the body needs." Specifically, a single-cell protein, combined with synthetic amino acids, vitamins and minerals.

This porridge, infamous but a priori good for health, obviously replaces any other food since in the real world of Matrix, all the animals have disappeared (the sun having been, we will come back to this, “blocked“). And with us, in 2021? It still strongly resembles drinks sold for 5 years as meal replacements, such as Soylent, Jimmy Joy and Feed. Kinds of smoothies flavored with banana, chocolate, or red fruits, but whose taste is not the most important: their objective is to provide those who drink them with all the nutritional intake they need.

These "superfoods" are composed of a cocktail of nutrients, good for our health, capable of increasing our energy tenfold, while avoiding making us fat. The same thing exists in the form of chocolate bars, as in the SF film “Soylent”, released in 1973. These products, presented as the food of the future, are already delighting busy urban workers and sportsmen.

For the creator of Soylent (the real drink, not the film), the former computer scientist Rob Rhinehart, this “drink of the future” could be a food substitute of choice in the countries of the South, but also in the kitchens of “those who have little time and who don't have time to think about what they are going to eat”.

They could also eventually represent an alternative to meat, in a world where there are too many humans and farm animals for a planet whose living beings are threatened by global warming. It is in this same perspective that plant-based steaks such as those from Beyond Meats, but also artificial meat, are multiplying. In San Leandro, Memphis Meats cultivates chicken meat in the laboratory, using stem cells. “Our current agriculture is destroying our health, the environment and animals. We are now able to produce healthier meat, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions”, assures Uma Valeti, CEO of the company.

6. We can turn off the sun

In Matrix, a war broke out at the beginning of the 21st century, between humanity and artificial intelligences. And it was after humans blocked machines' access to solar energy by “darkening the sky”, that the AIs decided to “grow” us in order to harvest our bioelectric energy; while keeping our minds "quiet" in the matrix.

Darken the sky, a fantasy? In The Matrix, humans "covered" the sun to fight against the machines. In our reality, in 2021, this prediction is about to come true. But for another purpose.

To fight against global warming, Harvard scientists have come up with the idea of ​​“blocking” the sun's rays. Funded in part by Bill Gates, the SCoPEx project ("Controlled Stratospheric Disturbance Experiment") aims to vaporize a gas in the stratosphere capable of blocking part of the solar radiation, so that the planet heats up less. Others plan to install in space, in orbit around the Earth, "giant mirrors" which would act on the sun's rays for the same purpose.

In June 2021, the SCoPEx project already flew a balloon containing 2 kilos of calcium carbonate, which it sprayed into the stratosphere for experimental purposes. Because the risk for the environment exists. In addition, such a process would require significant international coordination. Indeed, the question of governance would obviously arise: who would make the decision to send such gas into the stratosphere, and what would happen if things went wrong? Imagine in particular that this solar geo-engineering technology is used for military purposes… We would therefore be quite close to the scenario of the first Matrix. But without the AIs.

And in 20 years?

So what will the 4th Matrix, which will be released this December 21 at the cinema, tell us? What predictions for the next 20 years? No need to warn us against global warming, or even pandemics: these issues are our daily lot now.

As for the strong AI, so far away... Perhaps in a world where we worry about our professions, threatened by robots, the mission of this film could be to give us hope, by showing us rather (at the end ) a future where it would be possible to live in harmony with less “intelligent” machines. Rather than go to war with them. Who knows.