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Living in 1999 felt like standing on the edge of an event horizon.

The dot-com bubble was swelling as the World Wide Web began spreading like a Californian wildfire.

Keanu Reeves is playing Neo in The Matrix holding out his hand as objects float in the air around it.

‘The Matrix’ a timeless sci-fi classic, and its impact since its March 31 1999 release has been sprawling.

The first cell phones had been making the world feel much more connected.

Some argue this thawing process lasted as long as the mid-2000s.

It’s a timeless classic, and its impact since its March 31 1999 release has been sprawling.

The Matrix

When ‘The Matrix’ was released, the field of AI research was just emerging from a debilitating winter that spanned between 1987 and 1993.

That dry well of research funding is now overflowing, and corporations see massive commercial appeal in AI.

There’s a growing chorus of voices, too, that feel an AGI agent is on the horizon.

So asThe Matrixturns 25, maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched after all?

the matrix

Sitting on tattered armchairs in front of an old boxy television in the heart of a wasteland, Morpheus shows Neo the “real world” for the first time.

Here, he fills us in on how this dystopian vision of the future came to be.

Giving machines that spark of life the ability to think and act with agency backfired.

Here, they replicated and evolved developing smarter and better AI systems.

A portait of Alan Turing

Alan Turing posed the question in a 1950s paper of whether a machine can ever imitate human intelligence.

When humanity’s economies began to fall, they struck the machine civilization with nuclear weapons to regain control.

Unlike in our world, the machines inThe Matrixwere solar-powered and harvested their energy from the sun.

So humans decide to darken namely enslaving humans and draining their innate energy.

US director Quentin Tarantino arrives at the premiere of Frank Darabont’s new film “The Green Mile” in Los Angeles, December 1999.

Tarantino (pictured in 1999) reavealed that watching ‘The Matrix’ for the first time was an exciting experience.

“This can’t be real,” Neo tells Morpheus.

It’s a reaction we would all expect to have when confronted with such an outlandish truth.

But, as Morpheus retorts: “What is real?'

An official screenshot of Neo in The Matrix Resurrections

‘The Matrix’ has remained relevant for 25 years, with Keanu Reeves returning to play Neo in ‘The Matrix: Resurrections’ in 2021.

When the film was released, our reliance on machines was growing but not final.

Instead, it was a paradise in which humans were happy and free of suffering.

That’s when the machine race developed version 2.0.

The biggest jump came during the COVID-19 pandemic, with funding rising from $35 billion the previous year.

But things weren’t always so rosy.

Computer scientists were focusing on competing areas to solve niche problems and specific approaches.

It used 32 processors to evaluate 200 chess positions per second.

I have to pay tribute, Kasparov said.

The computer is far stronger than anybody expected.

Another major milestone was the creation of NaturallySpeaking by Dragon Software in June 1997.

This contemporary resurgence also extended to the language people used too.

“It’s Special Effects 10, Screenplay 0,” wrote Todd McCarthy in his review inVariety.

TheMiami Heraldrated it two-and-a-half stars out of five.

We had to discover that.”

One startling example is a formerGoogleengineer whoclaimed a chatbot the company was working on was sentient.

He suggests that humanity could build an AGI agent as soon as 2027.

The lack of sentience in the billions of machines around us is an obvious divergence fromThe Matrix.

But that doesn’t mean our own version ofThe Matrixhas the potential to be any less manipulative.

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