Jim Baen's Universe

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The Matrix and the Star Maker

Written by Mike Resnick

So here's humanity, downtrodden, unhappy, fed false images of the real world, and stacked up against us are dozens, perhaps thousands, possibly even millions of computer programs that have taken shape and form and voice. They're smarter than we are, they're faster and stronger, they're far more motivated.

And they don't like us very much.

That's the situation Neo finds himself in. The Matrix is not a forgiving place to be. Humans have been identified by these animated programs, known as "agents," as a new and virulent form of virus that must be controlled and, in certain instances, eradicated.

How did such a world come to pass?

According to The Matrix, it happened when mankind's computers became self-aware, when artificial intelligence took that next great stride from where the machines are now to where we are.

And, according to all the apocalyptic literature of science fiction and that small but popular subset of it called cyberpunk, Neo's world is a natural outgrowth of that phenomenon.

It's total rubbish, of course.

Hollywood's got it all wrong. That's not really surprising, when you realize that The Matrix is simply a logical outgrowth of all those purportedly science-fictional films of the 1950s that were actually anti-science films, and always ended with lines like "There are some things that man was not meant to know." (How to write a pro-science movie script seemed to be first and foremost among them.)

Hollywood makes its living from the fact that it deals not in ideas but in emotions. Oh, you can disguise them as ideas, as they did in The Matrix, but the movie doesn't explore the logical consequences of self-awareness among our machines. It just tries to scare the hell out of you, and bedazzle you with special effects and with what has come to be the Cyberpunk Look. This is the future, it says, and only a 25-year-old kid who has trouble emoting can save the rest of us.

And does he save us with his superior intellect? Of course not. He saves us by becoming, in some mystical, non-scientific way, a better karate/kung fu fighter than the agents.

Well, okay, it's a movie, no one is supposed to take it seriously. Except that millions of people do. So perhaps it's time to apply a little less karate and a little more brainpower to the problem, and see if we're really going to wind up in such a grim, dismal, essentially hopeless future.

Let's even grant most of the movie's premises and posit the following:

1. Machines can think.

2. Thinking machines have become self-aware.

3. Computer programs can emulate actual human beings and interact with them in exactly the way that they do in The Matrix.

What logically follows? A society in which the machines regulate every aspect of our behavior? A society where any man who steps out of line is terminated? A society where the machines feel that they are superior to the men whose lives they rule?

Only in the movies.

Let's put it in the most simple terms:

What is any thinking, self-aware entity—man or machine—likely to do when confronted with what is clearly and undeniably its creator?

Rule it? Kill it? Hate it?

Hell, no.

He'll worship it.

Consider the first, and most compelling, law of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics—that a robot cannot injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

You won't even have to program that into these "mortal enemies" from The Matrix. By the very definition of a self-aware intelligence, they will serve their creators gladly, unselfishly, uncomplainingly, and eternally.

Ah, but these are thinking machines, capable of learning, capable of thinking in new areas and directions. Won't some of them become atheists, so to speak?

Not a chance.

I am an atheist. You show me a bearded old man—or an unbearded young woman, for that matter—who can perform the godly miracles of the Old Testament and I'll convert so fast it'll make your head spin. I am an atheist only because I have not yet seen proof of my creator's existence; that's not going to be a problem for the self-aware A.I. machines.

If God touches my rib and pulls forth a fully-formed woman, I'm a believer as of that instant. And if a scientist, or even a programmer, shows a thinking machine exactly how he builds a machine or creates a program for it to run, that's their revelation at Tarsus.

We're not talking