AI, the Matrix, and the Loss of Humanity

Twenty-three years before the first demo of ChatGPT went public, The Matrix got two very important things right about AI and the future, things we still aren’t paying enough attention to: the necessity of friction to the human mind, and the danger of outsourcing thinking.

When Agent Smith interrogates Morpheus, he explains the core problem with the first version of the Matrix.

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world would dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about."

Agent Smith claims that pain and suffering are what humans require to orient themselves in an objective reality. But I think pain and suffering are simply the extreme version of what humans do require: friction. 

Friction: the force that resists the relative motion of two bodies coming into contact. I know the table is real because my hand does not slip through it. I encounter opposition as I move through the world.

In “The Problem of Pain,” CS Lewis argues that, for independent beings to coexist, there must be a fixed or inexorable nature through which they relate to each other. Air must exist so I can manipulate sound waves to communicate with you. Without an objective, fixed environment, there would be no distinction between minds.

He writes, “But if matter is to serve as a neutral field, it must have a fixed nature of its own. If a ‘world’ or material system had only a single inhabitant, it might conform at every moment to his wishes– ‘trees for his sake would crowd into a shade’.” He goes on to say, “Again, if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant laws, not all states of matter will be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given soul, nor all equally beneficial for that particular aggregate of matter which he calls his body. If fire comforts the body at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduced.”

Friction, then, is what separates an individual mind–the thing that interprets and makes meaning–from the objective reality we share. There is no friction between me and my desires. In fact, my desires are so inherent that the thoughts, “eat that apple,” or “smell that flower,” appear as me. But if I desire to walk down a road and a boulder is in my path? One I cannot think or wish away? Friction has been introduced.

(Do not come at me with quantum mechanics, I am trying to make a point here, and you get it.)

Sometimes friction appears in the form of pain, sometimes of frustration, effort, struggle, or simply the refusal of the world or other beings to conform to my will. And the effort of living with, conforming to, or altering that reality is where we begin to establish meaning and value. Blood, sweat, and tears is the phrase we use most often.

This friction between our minds and an objective reality or nature is the cost of living in a real world and, by extension, the cost of our access to every good thing the real world has to offer–wisdom, most of all.

Wisdom has always been seen as the most valuable of knowledge because it is embodied, tempered by judgment and guided by discernment, earned through the friction of effort and confrontation. People who did not just acquire information but submitted themselves to the process of learning, whatever that process might be, and were humbled by trying, failing, and being forced to start again, and then put that knowledge to the test by applying it to the real world, were said to have gained wisdom.

It is a path paved with struggle, but those willing to walk it were rewarded with mastery. They may have lamented the difficulty of the journey, but it was the only way to reach the desired destination. And the harder the journey was, the fewer were the pilgrims willing to suffer it.

As Tom Hanks’ character, coach Jimmy Dugan, says in A League of Their Own, “If it was easy, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”

Knowledge and wisdom, neuroplasticity (your brain’s ability to change and adapt), every skill, including music, art, and agriculture, even the ability to see for yourself the mind-dwarfing vastness of the ocean, requires you to accept the cost of friction. Effort is the price of admission. Wisdom is the reward of the process.

So what happens when friction gets removed from the process? When wanting and having are synonymous?

We actually know the answer to this question because we’ve been answering it for hundreds of thousands of years. Humans are, after all, the masters of outsourcing.

If a process is calorie-intensive, there is a biological and evolutionary benefit to outsourcing it. Digestion is a calorically expensive process, but so is finding food. The answer? Outsource a huge part of your digestion to bacteria! Then you can eat all kinds of stuff, and you don’t have to work as hard to find it. 

There are too many skills to learn in one lifetime? I’ll outsource my time and cognition of animal husbandry to you while I focus on making fabric, and then we’ll trade!

Escalators instead of stairs, climate control, cars, computers, industrial agriculture, all of these improve our quality of life by outsourcing the effort they replace, but they also have unintended, and sometimes unexpected, costs: pollution, sedentary bodies, disconnection from nature, loneliness, etc.

But it didn’t stop there.

We needed to find ways to outsource more, to consume more. Why? For profit–and control–of course. Enter capitalism and marketing. Consumers are more likely to buy in great numbers when the process of buying is as easy as possible. So, corporations take advantage of this.

Reduce the friction. Make it easier to buy. Easier to read. Easier to navigate. More digestible, more accessible. Faster, smoother, more efficient, less waste, less trouble, less struggle. Optimize, perfect, chip away at the rough spots until everything is so smooth that we slide from desire to possession without ever having to give consent.

Don’t think. Just buy. Adopt. Consume. Open your mouth and swallow; you don’t even have to chew or taste!

Waiting? That’s friction.

Struggle is friction.

Failure? Boredom? Pain? Effort? All hurdles between wanting and having, obstacles to be removed. It’s the outcome they want, anyway. Meat without death, art without sacrifice, knowledge without cost, the scent of a rose without the thorns.

But how poor a world when the scent of the rose exists in a bottle alone, and no one has ever smelt the bloom. Don’t worry, we will keep you so easily distracted that you’ll never realize you don’t actually know what a rose smells like.

Again, the Matrix got this part right.

• Tank: Here you go, buddy; "Breakfast of Champions."

• Mouse: If you close your eyes, it almost feels like you're eating runny eggs.

• Apoc: Yeah, or a bowl of snot.

• Mouse: Do you know what it really reminds me of? Tastee Wheat. Did you ever eat Tastee Wheat?

• Switch: No, but technically, neither did you.

• Mouse: That's exactly my point. Exactly. Because you have to wonder: how do the machines know what Tastee Wheat tasted like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tastee Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.

• Apoc: Shut up, Mouse.

With generative AI, what we are really being asked to do is take our natural inclination to make things more efficient, multiply it by capitalism’s demand for more and cheaper, remove the friction of the creative process–and with it the wisdom and discernment earned through trial and error–to make us more useful to capitalists. Easier to profit from.

And the farther we distance ourselves from reality, the easier we are to manipulate.

Maintaining full control over every area of our lives has always been costly. Most of us don’t make our own clothes, or even make our own cookies. We give up those skills in favor of focusing on other things. We now have more options for reducing friction than ever, so we must choose where to invest and where to outsource or rely on one another, as we always have. 

But the danger of outsourcing thinking and creativity is different than that of outsourcing our cooking, because our mind is the seat of our existence, the throne from which the story of our lives gets told. And the more we rely on AI to think for us, to create on our behalf, the more of that seat we abdicate to the corporations who control the algorithms.

In the name of ease, we are sacrificing more than we can imagine. As our personal abilities atrophy from lack of use, the skills, knowledge, even the intelligence stolen from us to build these models will be sold back to us. Sam Altman, the CEO of Open Ai, said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” Which means the greatest access to intelligence will always lie in the hands of those who can afford it.

Worse, we will continue to lose the ability to withstand friction and accept it as the cost of our connection to reality. Learned helplessness will intensify. Skills will be lost because we cannot withstand the discomfort of earning them. Eventually, we will not even realize that we miss them or that we lack the benefits and virtues gained in the process.

What will be left but to be absorbed by the Matrix, no more useful than a battery that sustains the system.

Remember, the value of the story is in the telling of it. Process, what we learn from it about who we are and what it is to be alive, is everything. Process is life, life is striving, and striving is friction. Removing the struggle, the friction, and outsourcing the process is asking for the story to end. 

"I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about."

Tower Room Publishing will never use generative AI. We are, and always will be, powered by people.