matrix

India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world.

The proliferation of AI tools has already started affecting how the Indian population perceives reality. For example, a photo of detained Indian wrestlers Vinesh and Sangeeta Phogat was edited to make it look like they were smiling in police custody. While this is not the first time people are being manipulated with edited images, the perceived difference between what is a real image and what is edited or simulated is being blurred with new AI tools.

For decades, concepts such as ‘post-humans’ and virtual reality prompted science-fiction communities to imagine simulated worlds and philosophers to propose that we live inside a simulation.

These debates have always flown down into pop culture with movies like Star Trek and The Matrix, where questions of reality have been percolated to the masses. While they may seem silly, with a cult following among a section of ill-informed communities who worship these ideas without rational debate, there is a need for such debate to understand technologically-advanced cybernetic societies.

The debates around reality are no longer hypothetical scenarios. Now, many of us are unable to perceive what is real and what is AI-simulated. French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s work Simulacra and Simulation offer a postmodernist perspective on this debate.

Baudrillard’s work on our electronic media culture dating back to the 1980s arms us with sociological theory to understand these effects of electronic media. He points out the difference between pretension and simulation. In the case of pretension, the difference is that reality remains unchanged. But in the case of simulation, it has much more to do with what is true, false, real and imaginary.

What happened with the Indian wrestlers was a real event of being arrested during an act of protest. But in the minds of BJP followers and activists, there is an imaginary version of reality where wrestlers are happy about being detained, or achieving an imaginary goal of defaming the government. Baudrillard theorises that “the real can be produced from miniaturised cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these.”

Also Read: Backstory: Had the Media Done its Job, Wrestlers Wouldn’t Have Had to Go Through This Ordeal

In this case, the AI models are producing an imaginary reality that is true for the millions of consumers of the BJP IT cell’s simulated image.

A comparison of the original and fake photographs. Photos: Twitter

The BJP IT cell has perfected the art of creating realities that are imaginary, where the distortion of reality is being distributed to millions of people using electronic media networks. Its ability to distort and promote new realities was scaled with the monopoly networks of Facebook and WhatsApp.

Now, AI gives fuel to this ability and makes it even more challenging for us to differentiate between what is real and imaginary. The proliferation and scale of these imaginary narratives are going to only increase from now as AI tools become better and more accessible.

Beyond the idea of being true or fake, people believe in the simulations performed by the BJP IT cell, leading them to further distort reality.

With the recent Odisha train crash, many have started promoting alternate versions of the accident for which Muslims, Pakistan and the opposition are responsible. These are not all versions from the IT cell, but from normal people who are already being prompted to act in this way.

Also Read: Social Media Users Add Communal Spin to Odisha Train Accident

The use of AI tools to distort reality is only going to increase over the next few months, as many states in India go through assembly elections. The increase in the proliferation of such manipulated content will be hard for fact-checkers and the normal population to detect, and will affect the way we perceive reality. Several web-based media outlets promoted by political parties are now using large language model-based AI tools to automate some version of their news reporting too.

The result of these tools being used with no regulation in sight is that society’s ability to see reality will be hindered. To quote the Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi, “minds” are being “hacked”, and these ‘simulated’ minds are dangerous both to themselves and to society.

In The Matrix, the people living inside the simulation are not entirely innocent either, as they have the ability to suddenly transform into agents who will not allow others to see reality.

Srinivas Kodali is a researcher on digitisation and a hacktivist.

Incredible as it may seem, the end of March marks 20 years since the release of the first film in the Matrix franchise directed by The Wachowski siblings. This “cyberpunk” sci-fi movie was a box office hit with its dystopian futuristic vision, distinctive fashion sense, and slick, innovative action sequences. But it was also a catalyst for popular discussion around some very big philosophical themes.

The film centres on a computer hacker, “Neo” (played by Keanu Reeves), who learns that his whole life has been lived within an elaborate, simulated reality. This computer-generated dream world was designed by an artificial intelligence of human creation, which industrially farms human bodies for energy while distracting them via a relatively pleasant parallel reality called the “matrix”.

This scenario recalls one of western philosophy’s most enduring thought experiments. In a famous passage from Plato’s Republic (ca 380 BCE), Plato has us imagine the human condition as being like a group of prisoners who have lived their lives underground and shackled, so that their experience of reality is limited to shadows projected onto their cave wall.

A freed prisoner, Plato suggests, would be startled to discover the truth about reality, and blinded by the brilliance of the sun. Should he return below, his companions would have no means to understand what he has experienced and surely think him mad. Leaving the captivity of ignorance is difficult.

In The Matrix, Neo is freed by rebel leader Morpheus (ironically, the name of the Greek God of sleep) by being awoken to real life for the first time. But unlike Plato’s prisoner, who discovers the “higher” reality beyond his cave, the world that awaits Neo is both desolate and horrifying.

Our fallible senses

The Matrix also trades on more recent philosophical questions famously posed by the 17th century Frenchman René Descartes, concerning our inability to be certain about the evidence of our senses, and our capacity to know anything definite about the world as it really is.

Descartes even noted the difficulty of being certain that human experience is not the result of either a dream or a malevolent systematic deception.

The latter scenario was updated in philosopher Hilary Putnam’s 1981 “brain in a vat” thought experiment, which imagines a scientist electrically manipulating a brain to induce sensations of normal life.

So ultimately, then, what is reality? The late 20th century French thinker Jean Baudrillard, whose book appears briefly (with an ironic touch) early in the film, wrote extensively on the ways in which contemporary mass society generates sophisticated imitations of reality that become so realistic they are mistaken for reality itself (like mistaking the map for the landscape, or the portrait for the person).

Of course, there is no need for a matrix-like AI conspiracy to achieve this. We see it now, perhaps even more intensely than 20 years ago, in the dominance of “reality TV” and curated identities of social media.

In some respects, the film appears to be reaching for a view close to that of the 18th-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who insisted that our senses do not simply copy the world; rather, reality conforms to the terms of our perception. We only ever experience the world as it is available through the partial spectrum of our senses.

The ethics of freedom

Ultimately, the Matrix trilogy proclaims that free individuals can change the future. But how should that freedom be exercised?

This dilemma is unfolded in the first film’s increasingly notorious red/blue pill scene, which raises the ethics of belief. Neo’s choice is to embrace either the “really real” (as exemplified by the red pill he is offered by Morpheus) or to return to his more normal “reality” (via the blue one).

This quandary was captured in a 1974 thought experiment by American philosopher, Robert Nozick. Given an “experience machine” capable of providing whatever experiences we desire, in a way indistinguishable from “real” ones, should we stubbornly prefer the truth of reality? Or can we feel free to reside within comfortable illusion.

In The Matrix we see the rebels resolutely rejecting the comforts of the matrix, preferring grim reality. But we also see the rebel traitor Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) desperately seeking reinsertion into pleasant simulated reality. “Ignorance is bliss,” he affirms.

The film’s chief villain, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), darkly notes that unlike other mammals, (western) humanity insatiably consumes natural resources. The matrix, he suggests, is a “cure” for this human “contagion”.

We have heard much about the potential perils of AI, but perhaps there is something in Agent Smith’s accusation. In raising this tension, The Matrix still strikes a nerve – especially after 20 further years of insatiable consumption.

Richard Colledge, senior lecturer and head of school of philosophy, Australian Catholic University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tag: matrix

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