George Orwell imagined a future where the government would take away our privacy.
He got the surveillance part right. But he got one important thing wrong.
In 1984, nothing is voluntary. Big Brother steals your privacy. The government watches everything you do, and you have absolutely no choice in the matter.
We took a different route.
We signed up for Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. We photographed our children, documented our vacations, announced our relationships and shared our opinions, interests and daily routines.
We voluntarily handed over an extraordinary amount of personal information in exchange for convenience, connection and entertainment.
And we agreed to the terms and conditions.
Every last word of them.
Well, technically we agreed. I doubt many of us actually read them.
Of course, government surveillance still exists, and Orwell was warning about much more than privacy. But the irony is hard to ignore.
Big Brother didn’t need to steal our privacy.
We sacrificed it at the altar of Zuckerberg.
And lately I’ve been wondering whether we’re about to do something similar with another famous science-fiction nightmare.
The Matrix.
What if we’ve misunderstood how that future might arrive?
What if the machines won’t need to imprison us?
What if we go willingly?
I remember a PlayStation commercial
Back in 2000, Sony released a commercial for the PlayStation 2 that wasn’t really advertising the PlayStation 2.
It was advertising the PlayStation 9.
A fictional console from the year 2078.
I remember a young guy opening a box containing a strange translucent sphere. Instead of inserting a game or picking up a controller, he inhales something released by the device.
Suddenly, gaming becomes a completely immersive experience.
The game isn’t something he watches on a television anymore. It’s something he experiences.
Watch the PlayStation 9 commercial on YouTube.
I remember thinking it was pretty cool.
I also remember thinking it was science fiction.
At the time, we were still getting excited about the graphics on the PlayStation 2. The idea that a video game could somehow connect directly with your senses seemed absurd.
But twenty-six years later, I’m not so sure.
We’ve already got virtual reality headsets, increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence and enormous digital worlds that people spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours exploring.
And now we’re approaching the release of Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6).
I think people are underestimating what games like this represent.
Not necessarily because of what GTA 6 itself can do, but because of where this technology might be heading.
GTA 6 isn’t just a game. It’s a virtual world.
I think people are looking at GTA 6 the wrong way.
It’s being treated as another highly anticipated video game.
Bigger map. Better graphics. More things to do.
But GTA isn’t really just a game anymore.
It’s a virtual world.
Think about what Rockstar has been building over the years.
Entire cities.
Traffic moving through the streets. People going about their daily routines. Weather changing. Day turning into night. Businesses, neighbourhoods, highways, beaches and thousands of details designed to convince you that you’re visiting an actual place.
Of course, it’s still a video game. The characters aren’t independent people, and much of what happens is programmed.
But the ambition is unmistakable.
We’re no longer just moving characters through levels.
We’re building worlds for people to inhabit.
And I suspect we’re only at the beginning.
GTA 6 might be one of the first steps on a very long yellow brick road.
Because now imagine what happens when increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence becomes part of these worlds.
What happens when AI characters start remembering you?
Imagine a future version of GTA where every character is powered by artificial intelligence.
You walk into a bar and strike up a conversation with someone.
A week later, you return.
They remember you.
They remember what you talked about. They ask how things turned out. They have their own problems, interests and relationships with other characters.
Maybe you become friends.
Maybe you become enemies.
Maybe you fall in love.
And the world doesn’t simply reset when you turn off the machine.
Things happen while you’re gone.
People move. Relationships change. Businesses fail. New buildings appear. The world develops its own history.
None of this would need to be scripted in advance.
And here’s where things get interesting.
In 2023, researchers at Stanford and Google demonstrated something called generative agents. They created a small simulated town populated by 25 AI characters that could remember experiences, make plans and interact with one another.
The characters went about their days, formed relationships and even organized a Valentine’s Day party after researchers gave one agent the initial goal of hosting it.
It was a relatively simple experimental world, not a functioning artificial society. But it demonstrated something important.
The idea of computer-generated characters with memories and evolving behaviour isn’t entirely science fiction anymore.
Now imagine combining those capabilities with increasingly sophisticated virtual reality.
And, eventually, perhaps some kind of direct connection between the brain and the simulation.
We’re a long way from knowing whether that last step will ever be possible.
But the direction of the thought experiment is fascinating.
At what point does playing a game become living another life?
The Matrix got one thing wrong
In the 1999 film The Matrix, machines have enslaved humanity inside a simulated reality.
People live their entire lives without knowing that the world around them isn’t real.
It’s a terrifying premise.
But I’ve always wondered whether the machines would really need to go to all that trouble.
Why imprison humanity inside a simulation when you could simply make one that people desperately wanted to enter?
Imagine being offered a world where you could experience almost anything.
You could visit ancient Rome.
Explore Middle-earth.
Command a starship.
Live in a recreated version of New York in the 1980s.
Or experience an entirely fictional universe designed around your particular interests.
Maybe you’d choose to be a great athlete.
Maybe you’d be an explorer.
Maybe you’d just want to live a quiet life in a beautiful place where money was never a problem.
And unlike a conventional video game, the experience wouldn’t have to end.
The world would keep evolving. The characters would remember you. Your decisions would have consequences.
You could build a life there.
Why wouldn’t people want that?
We’ve already demonstrated our willingness to exchange enormous amounts of time and personal information for relatively primitive digital experiences.
We spend hours scrolling through social media feeds that offer little more than photographs, short videos and the occasional argument with a stranger.
Imagine what happens when the alternative is an entire universe.
I suspect millions of people would happily spend a substantial portion of their lives inside it.
And I’m not convinced they’d necessarily be wrong.
What if escaping reality isn’t always a bad thing?
It’s easy to imagine the darker side of this future.
People abandoning their responsibilities. Losing interest in real relationships. Retreating into artificial worlds because reality has become too difficult.
But there’s another possibility.
I watched my father deteriorate in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s.
And I sometimes wonder what a technology like this might have offered him.
Imagine remaining physically in a nursing home but being able to experience the world as a young man again.
To walk through the neighbourhood you grew up in.
Visit familiar places.
Experience the freedom of being twenty-five instead of eighty-five.
I realize that Alzheimer’s complicates this considerably. Recreating someone’s childhood neighbourhood wouldn’t necessarily restore the memories or cognitive abilities the disease has taken away.
But as a thought experiment, it’s difficult to dismiss.
Spoiler note: The following section discusses the ending of Black Mirror’s San Junipero.
It reminds me of San Junipero, an episode of Black Mirror.
In that story, people can enter a simulated world where they’re young again.
But the idea goes much further than virtual reality entertainment.
They can choose to remain there permanently after their physical deaths.
The episode ends with their digital existence continuing inside an enormous server facility.
It’s essentially a technological afterlife.
And just in case the symbolism wasn’t obvious enough, the song playing over the ending is Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth.
Subtle, right?
But it’s an extraordinary idea.
If someone could spend their final years, or perhaps what comes after them, in a world where they’re healthy, happy and surrounded by people they love, who gets to decide that experience is somehow less valuable because it isn’t physically real?
Of course, whether a digital copy of someone’s mind would actually be conscious, or would still be the same person, is an enormous unanswered question.
But perhaps that’s the point.
The Matrix might not look like a prison to everyone.
For some people, it might look like paradise.
Is an artificial life necessarily less meaningful?
This is where the whole thing becomes much more complicated.
Suppose you spend years in a simulated world.
You make friends.
You fall in love.
You experience triumph, disappointment, grief and happiness.
Are those emotions somehow less real because the environment that produced them was artificial?
Think about what happens when you read a novel.
You know the characters aren’t real.
You know the places may not exist.
And yet you can become deeply attached to those people.
You can cry when they die.
You can miss them when the book ends.
Nobody seriously argues that the emotions you experienced while reading were imaginary simply because the story was fictional.
The experience was real, even if the events weren’t.
So perhaps a simulated world could produce genuine meaning.
But I also wonder what happens when reality becomes something we can customize.
In the real world, other people don’t exist to make us happy.
They disagree with us.
They disappoint us.
They make demands.
Sometimes life is boring, frustrating and unfair.
An artificial world could potentially remove much of that friction.
But would that make us happier?
Or would it gradually make us less capable of dealing with the real world?
Would we still value relationships that required compromise when we could have relationships designed around our preferences?
Would we still accept ordinary disappointment when we could simply choose a more satisfying experience?
I don’t know.
And I think that’s what makes this future both exciting and frightening.
What if we’re already living in a simulation?
There’s another philosophical rabbit hole here.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom’s famous simulation argument suggests that if advanced civilizations eventually develop the ability to simulate conscious beings, and if they choose to create enormous numbers of those simulations, simulated minds might vastly outnumber minds living in the original physical reality.
Under those assumptions, how confident could we really be that we’re living in the original world?
It’s an interesting argument, although it depends on assumptions we haven’t established, including whether consciousness can actually be simulated.
But think about what we’re discussing.
We may eventually create entire artificial worlds that their inhabitants experience as real.
What if that technology has already been developed somewhere else?
What if this is the simulation?
What if everything I’m describing has already happened, and we’re living inside a recreation of an earlier period in human history?
Maybe someone wanted to experience the world before artificial intelligence changed everything.
Maybe this is their version of nostalgia.
Maybe it’s turtles all the way down.
I don’t necessarily believe any of that.
But the fact that we’re beginning to imagine technologies that could raise these questions outside science fiction is remarkable.
We’ve been escaping into other worlds for centuries
There’s something else about all of this that strikes me.
Human beings have always wanted to visit other worlds.
Long before video games, we had books.
Frank Herbert gave us Arrakis.
Isaac Asimov imagined civilizations spanning entire galaxies.
Stephen King created a strange, dying world that had moved on.
And readers willingly disappeared into those places for hours at a time.
I’ve certainly done it.
That’s part of what I love about reading.
For a while, you’re somewhere else.
But there’s an important difference between reading about another world and having a machine generate one around you.
When you read a book, your imagination does an enormous amount of the work.
The author gives you the words.
You construct the world.
You decide what the characters look like. You imagine their voices. You fill in the details.
Every reader experiences a slightly different version of the same story.
A fully immersive artificial world might eventually do much of that work for us.
Would that make the experience better?
Maybe.
Would something be lost?
Maybe that too.
And perhaps the two experiences would simply coexist.
After all, movies didn’t eliminate books. Video games didn’t eliminate movies.
Human beings seem to have an endless appetite for stories and imaginary worlds.
Maybe the Matrix would simply become the most sophisticated storytelling medium we’ve ever created.
Or maybe it would become something much more consequential.
A place where people don’t just experience stories.
They live them.
The future might not look like a dystopia
When I think about the future of artificial intelligence, I’m increasingly convinced that we’ve spent too much time imagining the wrong kind of danger.
We picture machines taking over.
Robots marching through the streets.
Humanity fighting desperately to preserve its freedom.
But what if the future looks nothing like that?
What if it arrives as an incredible new product?
Something people can’t wait to try.
Something so entertaining, so immersive and so personally rewarding that we gradually begin spending more and more of our lives inside it.
And what if, for some people, that’s actually a good thing?
That’s what makes the possibility difficult to dismiss.
George Orwell imagined a world where Big Brother watched us because we had no choice.
Instead, we enthusiastically surrendered much of our privacy in exchange for digital conveniences.
The Matrix imagined machines imprisoning humanity inside an artificial reality.
But I suspect that if we ever create a simulation convincing enough to live in, nobody will need to force us inside.
We’ll buy it.
We’ll download it.
We’ll recommend it to our friends.
And we’ll wonder how we ever lived without it.
Books mentioned
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