Are we all trapped in The Matrix 25 years later?

The only exception being my contrarian friend but his opinions aren’t any more intelligent, just different.

Has this really been any different since the dawn of modern propaganda though? The only difference is now we use it to sell goods not just political ideas.

I think the few who leave Plato’s cave on their own are far less than what we would like and those who remain will never truly be free. Their comfort lies in the cave.

25 years ago I thought "that's neat" for a clever film twist. Much like the Sixth Sense. But then a few years later I read Nick Bostrom's op-ed in the NYT, and started considering the notion seriously.

In the time since The Matrix we've shifted to a world where we've brought AI further than anyone thought it would be in their lifetimes with continued compounding gains, are using that tech to build virtual twins of ourselves and the world around us, and are even using AI to create dynamic agency and interactions within virtual worlds modeled off human thought processes.

Meanwhile we are still struggling to piece together the shattering realization that while our universe behaves as if continuous at large scales that at low fidelity it converts to discrete units at the point of stateful interactions (and reversed if the state is lost, much like a memory efficient program might do). We just sort of shrug and say it's 'weird' but take it for granted as how the world works because we've grown up knowing that's the case. I sometimes wonder if Einstein would have been so reluctant to think the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it if he had hundreds of parallels in virtual skyboxes where exactly that thing is the case when thinking about it.

We process time so linearly it can be hard to think about the future as prologue, but looking at the present relative to 25 years past and thinking about the future, it strikes me that the most preposterous concept in The Matrix was not the nature of its reality, but the notion that there were any bodies in pods somewhere to exit into.

Still, I have no doubt that in another 25 years we'll continue to see it embraced as metaphor while rejected in a more literal interpretation, just in a world where it reflects even less fiction vs science than today.

The irony is that AI agents in a virtual world, if correctly modeling human behavior, would also reject the same concept.

Not that I do not enjoy the vision of passing the stick from organic creatures, made by happenstance, to purpose built machines. But as a human, I do miss the endless opportunities of the 2000s chaos and I feel like they were better times than todays monitored, calculated, cold life under cameras & microphones.