Dream Jobs

In the movie ‘The Matrix’, super computers at the time had to run on batteries, and since human beings had more of a charge to them then your typical Ray o vac battery. So they farmed crops of humans who were kept alive by existing in a virtual world consisting of a nine to five grind in a cubicle and no stock options.  And so humans thrived in their real and virtual cocoons, and as the machines figured from hard experience, they would have it no other way. (except for those few who wanted a different reality, and live in a cave and eat pea soup for the rest of their lives. These folks were called neo-phytes).

Dream Jobs

What with green energy and fracking, humankind has got this energy thing down for the time being. Although the battery problem is solved, the reality one persists, and that’s when the Matrix reenters, and in a good way if you like cubicles that is.

According the most prognosticators on the subject, computing power is trending to infinity. This is particularly good for app creators, who with all that infinite power can model not just Duke Nukem, but the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke, and even lowly you. Called an ancestor simulation by the Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, Bostrom has surmised that if one of your descendents, and I mean just one, decides to emulate you to see what life was like in the 21^st century, or perhaps get even with you for the mega trillions of national debt he has to pay back for your medicare, then very likely he can emulate just about everybody, and in every variation. In other words, if anybody in the future decides to run an ancestor simulation, then almost certainly YOU are living the mind of a computer, and are a simulation! Even I cannot make this up, but ultimately I don’t need to if I am made up.

Well, back to my dream job………………….

A Choice of Realities

In the movie ‘The Matrix’, reality or suffering through reality came to a simple choice between a blue pill and a red pill. One reality was pleasant and unreal, and the other unpleasant and real.

                                                           

Whether you experienced one or the other depended upon your connections, literally. Take the blue pill and you get unplugged, and down you go through an out of this world laundry chute into a dark subterranean world where pea soup is the main course, but at least the whole underworld can get down and boogie in a huge dance party celebrating how good things are when they’re really, really, bad.

Facing reality has usually been framed as a good thing, even though it is bad. This is a standard conceit for movie plots, religions, and economic policies. But what if facing and accepting reality is a pretty good thing, and makes you feel happy, calm, and productive? What if it is the illusion that is bad, except we don’t know it yet?

Accepting reality means forswearing your choices, at least for the present. It is the world of the straight and narrow, where everything is available, in due course. It represents an impingement of freedom, or choice, but that’s reality for you, as you can’t always get what you want or when you need it. But a new and different reality is emerging, where you can always get what you want, and when you want it. This applies to information, and to many, information is enough to provide a reality of its own. Information is simultaneous, choice is free, and the perceived world becomes a gigantic mash up of words, sights, and sounds, a pea soup of information that puts you in dark non real place that might as well be the center of the earth. But at least you get to dance.