WIRED Peers into the future of reality

First Matrix the film introduced a generation of sci-fi fans to the look of an ancient philosopher: What if your whole reality was a lie? Two decades on, the plot of the film — free-thinking traitors trying to expose the lies behind an oppressive system — is more timely than ever, but its conceptual premise is almost uncanny. The technologies that have emerged since then really raise questions about what is real, but now they do it in more bizarre ways than the movie predicted, if rarely quite sinister.

Your everyday reality is an increasingly synthetic experience: Computerized voices exist smart speaker, deepfakes bring dead movie actors back to life and AI-generated works of art will be sold for attractive prices in the auction. Simulacrum is also expanding into food: Supermarket shelves are already stocked with countless vegan alternatives to meat and other animal products, and soon “real” room-raised meat. experiment, will join them. You can live in virtual reality and enhance your physicality with virtual characters (Pokémon Go), street signs (Google Live View) or furniture (Ikea Studio). All of your social media profiles may be real, but do any of them reflect “the real you”? The same question goes for those records you can’t even see — those are combined from data held by credit card companies, shopping sites, or search engines. . Each person is a virtual version of you, affecting your physical life and if there is an error in the data, you become someone unlike you. And now, people are suddenly talking about building something called “metaverse. ”

In short, things have gotten weird, and they’re going to get a lot weirder very, very quickly. So we decided to use release Matrix Recovery served as the springboard for a WIRED special that explores the future of reality — one in which the question isn’t “What if we were all living in a simulation and didn’t know it?” but “What happens when we’re living in a simulation and in reality simultaneously, and we know it, but we have trouble telling them apart?” In that case, it doesn’t matter whether you take the red pill or the blue pill: We’re all going down the rabbit hole. —THE EDITORS