War of humans and machines

This was my first time watching the matrix and I could definitely tell that this was totally relevant to what the modern society is going to face. In the movie the Matrix, the main character Thomas Anderson(alias hacker name Neo) starts getting puzzled by the fact that he’s getting this cryptic messages from the Matrix. Trinity contacts Neo telling him there’s a man called Morpheus that can tell him the truth about the Matrix. When he meets with this man he is asked to make a choice between the red pill which will allow him to know the truth about the matrix or the blue pill that returns him to his normal life and Neo takes the red pill. Morphues explains to Neo that The Matrix was some kind of computer simulation that humans were living inside and he and his team are trying to save humankind from this simulation.

Before the movie our GRF Magdala brought up this quote from Descartes “I think therefore I am”to think about while watching the film. This statement is based on Descarte’s philosophy that  was built on the idea of radical doubt( in which nothing that is perceived or sensed is necessarily true. The only thing that remains true that there is a mind or consciousness doing the doubting and believing its perceptions). While watching this movie there were many moments that reminded me of this quote. The point that the main character doubts why is he getting messages from the matrix(the thought that he thinks in a real world does not necessarily mean that it’s the reality)  or the fact human thoughts have the power of creating of a computer simulation that raised to the existence of completely different world.

As a CS major I could definitely see that what the movie was picturing is what a lot people are fearing about at the moment: A rise of an artificial intelligence that will overtake humans and a war that in which the machines have a higher chance of winning since already they have exceeded humans in many skills. This is the complete opposite of what happened in the movie in which humans won the war at the end. However, the movie wasn’t trying to say this, it was trying to convey the message that human beings like living better in a free world that is free from computer manipulation.

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