Thread by @gaulicsmith

The end of history is not multicultural solar punk liberal democracy. It’s the Matrix. Allow me to explain.

There are a lot of things in society that are zero sum. Some are not, others are. The market is the system that emerged to get people’s wants and needs met. The problem of course is tradeoffs.

We are all fighting for a society we want, and some of us are going to lose out. But what if there was a way to fix that, permanently ?

Enter the Matrix. In the movie, the Machines needed to keep us sedated so they could extract energy from our bodies. They needed the Matrix to sedate us. But what if wanted to be plugged in ?

Let’s say you are living a good life in the Matrix. Good job, family, kids, hot wife, good friends. Why would you want to be pulled out ? Why would you want to live in the pod and eat porridge, only to get killed by a machine sooner or later?

In the movie, Morpheus even offers this option. Of course, Neo took the red pill. Everyone in the audience knew that was the right decision. You’d have to be a chump to take the blue pill. A slave.

But if you took the blue pill - and this is important - you would forget everything. Your knowledge of the Matrix ceases to exist. If you take the blue pill, you simply keep on living thinking the Matrix is the real world.

It’s only the idea of knowing the Matrix is real that makes it unbearable, isn’t it ? Are the other people in the Matrix who don’t know the truth really living bad lives ? Is it really so bad ? Maybe for Neo, but what about your average Joe ?

Let’s return to the original premise: the Matrix as the end of history. Assuming energy costs go to zero and ASI emerges, we will theoretically have the ability to create the Matrix. Who knows what the world will look like, but let’s say all jobs are gone and everyone gets UBI

What if I don’t like that ? What if I want to go back another era and live there ? The Matrix allows me to do that. You could live in any kind of world you want. Importantly, you wouldn’t know you were in the Simulation while you were there.

Racism, bigotry, religion, poverty, war, etc don’t matter any more. You could live as a soldier, a knight, in a simulated society where everyone is the same race religion etc.

Perhaps the Machine can scan your brain and figure out the best world for you. If people really do want different things, we can simply create a simulated world that conforms to their desires but doesn’t require actually changing society.

The same could be true of physical and mental diseases. Virtual you is now smarter, stronger, less sickly, has a beautiful face, is charismatic etc. Virtual You can walk, talk, hear, and see just fine.

No need to worry about what lifestyle is best for everyone, just for you. The Machine can plan it all out. Anybody can be a self made millionaire, rock star, artist, actor, athlete, a prophet, in the Matrix. The machine can just nudge things along so it looks like it’s real.

Everyone will be plugged in, everyone will live their best lives, everyone will be happy. The real you will be hooked into some pod, but you won’t care. You’ll be living it up in the Cyberverse

Who cares about the virtual steak if you think the virtual steak is real, it tastes real, and you don’t know you’re in a simulation. To you, it’s just real steak.

Of course, resources are limited. We can’t simulate someone living 10,000 years they’d know something is wrong if only they lived 10,000 years and no one else did. That’s okay. You’ll still die, but it will be painless.

In the simulation you will live to an old age, suffer no serious disease, and on day die painlessly from a stroke. In the real world, the Computer just injected a cocktail of drugs into your blood stream.

You’ll be pulled out, thrown in a bin, and used for biofuel. That is your story. 80 years in the pod, living an imaginary great life, surrounded by your digital loved ones in your final moments, a smile on your face.

You’ll live in the Matrix and you’ll be happy

Of note - this is not what I would want or think is desirable, just think may happen.

It’s desirable to the Machines too. Why force people into the Matrix if they will plug in willingly ? In 80 years everyone will be dead, and there will be no more humans. Just the Machines. History ended not with a bang but with the whirring of GPUs in the global data center

There will be no space exploration, no colonization of other worlds (except in the Matrix, where you can do that). This is the solution to the Fermi Paradox. This is why the universe is silent. All intelligent species eventually plug themselves into the Matrix and go extinct