Why Pokemon Go made me realize a future like the Matrix might be cool.
Before Pokemon Go, I'd always considered myself immune to the appeals of mobile gaming. Personally, I found them very pointless and a massive waste of time. But all that changed once Pokemon Go hit the scene. The irony is that I am not crazy about Pokemon. My brothers and I are more of a Digimon clan (we especially enjoyed the first two seasons). I started off as a casual player, but the next thing I knew, I found myself wandering around my neighborhood at 1 a.m. looking for a Haunter.
Playing this game got me thinking about what the future holds for humanity. Before Pokemon Go and VR, I wasn't sure what the future (100 years from now) would look like. I've seen way too many 90s and early 2000s sci-fi movies consistently get it wrong. But after thinking about it, I've concluded that the future might be like it is depicted in The Matrix.
In The Matrix, people have somehow managed to screw things up so badly that machines have taken over, put us in a nursery, and used our sleep-induced bodies to generate energy to power themselves. As grim as that vision of the future seems, the actual future might be very close to it (minus the machine overlords).
Consider the current trend of VR/AR; we are slowly finding ways to subsidize our reality with fantasies or visuals that we typically wouldn't find in our present reality. But if we take this trend 100 years into the future, we might see the first theoretical digitization of a brain. Basically, in about 100 years, we might have theoretical grounds for turning our minds into digital signals. What does that mean? It means that eventually, we'll all be able to exist in a virtual world. We may decide that our universe is not nearly as exciting as the one we digitally create or that a world in which we depend less on chance is more appealing to us.
If you think about it, this is essentially the premise of The Matrix, without the grim caveat. But consider a possible future in which humanity goes digital. We would unanimously decide to digitize our minds and employ AI to watch over us and maintain the massive systems that power our virtual worlds.
Anyway, this is just what I think might happen. Then again, I could be wrong like all the sci-fi movies out there.
