From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat May 08 1999 - 23:56:20 MDT
_The Matrix_ revisited: Why are we such fans?
I was speaking to a friend lately, a big movie aficionado. He didn't
like the Matrix and couldn't understand why one of the most brilliant
people he knew (this friend is semi-mundane, so that doesn't count as
boasting - not on this list!) would be infatuated with a movie with a
bad plot, no characterization, no meaning that wasn't shoved down our
throat, and what he called "a sell-out of the intellectual concept in
favor of shoot-em-ups".
I started out by explaining that we all liked the Matrix because it was
what we had all wanted to do ourselves - walk up a wall, punch through
bricks, and so on. The characters didn't *need* deep emotional lives
for us to sympathize with them; we *wanted* to be in their shoes. "Ah,"
he said, "fantasy fulfillment". Well, I didn't see what was wrong with
that (it's a perfectly legitimate form), but it still didn't quite seem
to cover the fanatic devotion on the part of people who had never cared
about a movie before. (I hadn't.) And eventually I came up with this.
** SPOILERS **
I think that the Matrix is a transhumanist movie in the original,
highest sense. Technically AIs are the enemy, but the movie isn't about
"humans against machines". It's "humans against reality". The free
humans aren't fighting to *preserve* the world we know, as in all the
bad anti-machine movies; they're fighting to *break* it. They're
fighting to break the limits. _The Matrix_ takes our world of 1999 and
says, "This isn't life you're living! This is a prison!"
It's that concept that lies at the core of transhumanism. And the
characters in _The Matrix_ don't just believe this, they aren't just
warriors for our cause - they *embody* it. They can kick through walls.
They can take blows that would punch straight through an ordinary
human. They can run up walls. They can do all that, not because they
believe in the Force, but because they *don't* believe in our world.
They serve and represent our ideal, that knowledge breaks limits, that
technology breaks reality.
Who cares about Superman? Who cares about Luke Skywalker? They're just
guys with slightly less restrictive limits, and they have the power
because of "magic". Most special-effects movie heroes get that way
because of "magic" - and that *is* pure wish-fulfillment. In _The
Matrix_, the powers are explained, and it's an explanation we can all
believe in. Especially we transhumanists - we know that our limited
reality is true, but we don't accept it. We don't *believe* in reality,
we aren't emotionally invested. And that's why we believe in _The Matrix_.
The AIs in the movie don't represent The Evils of Mechanization. They
represent Life as We Know It. The AIs represent humanity - the way *we*
use "humanity", as a set of hated limits, "only human", something to
overcome. For all the movie's surface Frankensteineity, at heart it
truly is technophilic. The good guys are fighting back with high
technology as well, and the message is world-breaking change, not
nostalgia and mysticism. Maybe the movie doesn't do a good job of
preparing folks for the concept of AI, but I think it will do an
excellent job of preparing them for the concept of Singularity.
And that's why we call _The Matrix_ a transhumanistic film.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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