This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented “human flourishing”. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027 scenario, warn that it may “kill all the people”. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetized digital technology, and what’s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, societal atomization, political polarization, enhanced surveillance and censorship — the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.

Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora’s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What’s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviors of humanity.

We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonize space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.

The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology — a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. René Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the “masters and possessors of nature”. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it”, rid us of “an infinity of maladies”, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation — a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today’s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.

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Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfillment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.

In the long run, technology — which promised to give people what they want, when they want it — was the easiest of sales. It didn’t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called technē, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality — the real character of human existence, felt and understood — paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.

Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be molded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal’s “rational soul” is the spirit of technology, which is moving with “ever increasing acceleration”. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing “the progress of the future”: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).

For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for “a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present”. Later, manmade “globes” — space shells 10 miles in diameter — will replace the pathetic one we’ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, “there would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel”. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: “the stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”

In Bernal’s estimation, the flesh — the human body — is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.” What the flesh needs now is “radical alteration” through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. “Normal man”, Bernal insists, “is an evolutionary dead end”, and there is much work to be done: “We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.”

Bernal envisions “the direction of mechanism by pure volition” (something Elon Musk’s Neuralink, now rivaled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg — which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat — is apt to strike us as “a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature… he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present”.

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The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological “new man”, Bernal writes, is our species’ persistent irrationality, especially including its “unintelligent respect for the past”. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilization was founded. For “we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil” — the retrograde sensibility that rejects “the progress of dehumanization”. That can happen only if “the scientific expert” — linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses — rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom”. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite “are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them”, might be allowed to live on Earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment”.

Bernal’s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we’ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.

Musk’s idea of space colonization was a political project, which he gave up on when he realized that “woke AI” would follow us to Mars. His desire to make a clean break with the ideological overload of contemporary life was so strong that he was prepared to abandon the Earth. How many people would have been willing to join him? The answer would give us some idea about the insufficiency of meaning that Bernal so completely expresses in his dystopian vision.

The device consisted of a life-size figure, dressed in the “Oriental” style and seated in front of a chessboard. When it defeated several opponents at court, it was a sensation: widely known as the “Mechanical Turk”, it toured France, Britain and the United States, in the course of which it played many games including against Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.

The only hitch: the Mechanical Turk was a fake. Though the intricacy of the hoax was itself a feat of remarkable engineering, the chess-playing intelligence was supplied by a human cleverly concealed inside the “machine”.

Today, humanoid robots are so life-like they’re again triggering accusations of fakery – and, as the Mechanical Turk did, fears that intelligent machines might be poised to take over the world. When the humanoid robot Ai-Da “addressed” the House of Lords to give evidence on the impact of technology in the creative industries, some Lords were reportedly “terrified“.

But are such devices really a threat? The answer is probably not – at least, not directly. Lifelike automata are not the real threat, so much as a diversion from it.

We’ve been building mechanised imitations of humans, animals and even gods all the way back to ancient times. The ancient Greeks used automata in temples and processions: ancient sources describe mechanical figures that danced or poured libations, trumpets that sounded automatically on the opening of temple doors, and other contrivances designed to inspire awe or reverence.

This knowledge thrived in the Roman empire — but after its fall, the West largely lost interest in technology. For the medieval peoples of Christian Europe, the world was a place not of engineering challenges but mystery and enchantment: a book written by God, in which divine order suffused everything. Meddling in God’s domain was, to put it mildly, frowned upon.

By the Renaissance, the printing press was whittling away at Church monopoly on access to knowledge, while the knowledge of the ancients began to spread once more. Increasingly, the world seemed less God’s mystery than a place full of puzzles to be mastered.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first influential creators of automata in the creative ferment of the early modern era. Among his designs were a humanoid “knight” figure, and (reportedly) a mechanical lion whose chest opened to present a bunch of lilies to the King of France.

René Descartes tipped the scales still further away from mystery toward engineering a century later. He advanced the idea that instead of being governed by God’s constant imposition of divine order, it worked according to mechanistic laws.

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Descartes wasn’t an atheist, but in his view, God was something akin to a clockmaker, and the cosmos God’s clock. Accordingly, Descartes declared that he saw “no difference between machines built by artisans and objects created by nature alone”. Only the human soul was exempt from these mechanistic laws: the one divine spark, piloting a meat suit from a seat (Descartes hypothesised) in the pineal gland.

The mechanistic, Cartesian view of the cosmos paved the way for a frenzy of investigation, exploration and experimentation, as inventors set about seeing if they could replicate the work of the divine clockmaker. One effect of this was a flourishing golden age of automata, through the 18th and 19th centuries. Along with the Turk — a feat of engineering even if its intelligence wasn’t real —surviving examples from this period include a humanoid automaton who writes letters, another who draws pictures, and one that plays the organ.

Another marvel, later destroyed in a fire, was a mechanical duck that first wowed the French court in 1740 by flapping its wings, quacking, splashing in water and even (apparently) defecating. Onlookers included Voltaire; the court marvelled at the mechanical recreation of life, and hailed its creator as the new Prometheus.

The inventor, Jacques de Vaucanson, typified this remarkable age of mad, whimsical, intricate inventiveness — as well as the fact that those who created such machines often faced the fury of others for whom the world was still God’s book. As a novice monk, he devised a machine that served dinner – only to find that it wasn’t celebrated by his fellow-monks but denounced as diabolical. Devastated, de Vaucanson abandoned his novitiate and fled to Paris, where he made several more automata including the duck, and a “flautist” who played a real tune.

But these were all, in the end, just machines: intricate but inert. It’s in the human “ghost” in the Mechanical Turk’s “machine” that we find a clue to the shadow cast by such automatons – as well as in the other robots that de Vaucanson created. For the playful, magical and unnerving automata created to amuse kings and nobles were also the exuberant bow-wave of technologies with far more pragmatic and far-reaching consequences. The real work went on in the mechanisation of more ordinary areas of life – especially further down the social scale. And some of the complex interconnections between automation and the transformation of life for the poorest are evident in the history of the word “Robot” itself.

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The modern world uses “robot” to refer to mechanical devices that carry out work previously done by humans; the origin of the term lies in the Robot: forced labour owed by the peasantry to their aristocratic landlords in the Habsburg territories.

In his history of the Habsburg empire, AJP Taylor notes that it was abolishing the Robot that began Hungary on the journey to embracing mechanisation. Taylor points out that the main effect of emancipating the peasantry was enabling the industrialisation of farming: “The great estates, freed from the inefficient Robot, could be conducted more economically. The steam ploughs of Hungary, a striking feature of the late nineteenth century, were the result of peasant emancipation.”

And these innovations were byproducts of the same frenzy of robot-inventing creativity as the automata. Along with marvels such as the Digesting Duck, in 1745 de Vaucanson also invented the first automated loom: a development that would later play a crucial role in mechanising forms of work that had previously been the preserve only of humans. And what should concern us is less whether machines will become sentient (they won’t), as what the effects of ever greater mechanisation will be on humans.

Marx observes in Das Kapital (1867) that “History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers.” Similarly, for a glimpse at what advances in humanoid robotics are actually for at ground level, look at “Quinn“. Quinn is a customer-service robot: instead of paying several human salaries, a hotelier can install a Quinn at front desks across a whole chain, backed up by just a few remote operators, able to step in if a query is too complex for the machine. Further down the scale, self-checkout machines are effectively clumsy Quinn devices, that displace the work of sensemaking onto the customer, and troubleshooting onto a skeleton staff of supervisors.

And this displacement of human skill and intelligence in turn re-orients human work to machine priorities. Marx described the way factory assembly-lines compelled human workers to adapt their movements, working speed and behaviour to the demands of the machine, rather than employing tools in the interests of work performed to a human pattern. The same obtains, too, for subsequent waves of automation.

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In the 21^st century, “Mechanical Turk” gives its name to an online platform that makes dull, repetitive data work affordable for buyers by outsourcing it remotely — to workers paid, as the New York Times reported in 2019, as little as $0.97 an hour. We find many such exploited human “ghosts” in the AI “machine”: the Amazon fulfilment workers optimised to breaking-point (and, notoriously, peeing in bottles) by algorithmic surveillance, for example, or the gig-economy content moderators workers struggling with PTSD from the horrific things they’ve seen.

And there are even humans, hidden in AI every bit as uncomfortably as the Mechanical Turk’s concealed operator, whose role is to make up the shortfall in the dumb “intelligence” of the machines. Take, for example, the people hired to impersonate chatbots for companies who want to look cutting-edge.

The convergence of human and machine in turn makes actual humanness into a luxury. As mechanical weaving made textiles cheap, so hand-woven fabrics are now wildly expensive – as is anything created by hand with genuine artisan skill. Likewise, as the hospitality industry has automated and de-personalised through the Covid era, “contactless” travel has made human contact a premium extra — because what people really want is to talk to a human. One hotel industry outlet describes human assistance as “the hallmark of a luxury travel experience”.

So it doesn’t really matter if automata exist that are capable of deceiving some humans (or at least Google engineers) about their humanness. The ones that get rolled out at scale don’t bother aiming for verisimilitude, and it’s these that most radically transform our lives at scale.

While we marvel (or shudder) at the simulacra which convince, and numbly tolerate the ones that don’t, every advance re-orders another wave of human work to the machine’s priorities. And every time they do so, another facet of human warmth, intelligence and skill becomes a premium extra, for the lucky few.

Mattis was thinking of the philosopher’s Meditation on First Philosophy, championed the importance of doubt by hypothesising that everything he thought he knew about reality might be an illusion created by an evil demon. Of course, The Matrix is about a lot more than that. The Wachowskis themselves have cited a litany of influences: ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the cybernetics expert Kevin Kelly, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Jean Baudrillard, whose 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation appears in the movie. The phrase “desert of the real” comes from its very first page, although the man himself sniffed that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce”.

Critics and fans have suggested numerous other influences: Plato’s cave, Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, Philip K Dick, Plato, Socrates, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Dostoevsky, Sartre and even Doctor Who. The essays in the 2002 book The Matrix and Philosophy contradict each other to hilarious extent: It’s Buddhist! It’s Christian! It’s Marxist! It’s postmodern! Yet none are wrong exactly because the movie is a mash-up of ideas, not a thesis. When the Wachowskis were asked in a web chat how many of these perceived allusions were intentional, they replied in the teasing spirit of a Sixties Bob Dylan press conference: “All of it.”

In the week that Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the franchise, opens, it’s worth remembering that before The Matrix was released in March 1999, it was unflatteringly compared to the 1995 flop Johnny Mnemonic, another film about virtual reality starring Keanu Reeves.

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But it was no Johnny Mnemonic. Raking in almost half a billion dollars, it proved that Hollywood could tap into the new immersive nature of gaming, paved the way for the superhero imperium, and (to the immense benefit of Christopher Nolan) made explicitly philosophical non-franchise blockbusters a going concern. Better still, and despite two widely disliked sequels, it became a cultural touchstone. The Wachowskis talked about “making mythology relevant in a modern context” and they succeeded in spades. The Matrix has become a modern myth and, like any myth, it has been interpreted in radically different ways.

The brilliance of The Matrix is that it can make anybody feel clever. It signals that it is about something profound but the basic conceit is very simple. You could grasp it by knowing your Descartes or just by listening to Queen: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”

Reeves’s character believes he is a coder called Thomas Anderson, living in a boring 1999. In fact, he resides comatose in a gooey pod in the late 22^nd century, where he serves as an organic battery for humanity’s new AI overlords. His life has been a simulation, a dream, the Matrix. Waking up is a kind of rebirth. At the end, he tells those damned dirty machines that he will usher in “a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible”.

The Matrix was perfectly timed. The AI law enforcer Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) explains that the Matrix takes place in an infinite 1999 because it was “the peak of your civilisation”. Movie-goers in that period would have had a different impression. There were multiple examples of what the critic Joshua Clover calls “Edge of the Construct” movies, in which “reality” is revealed to be a hi-tech charade created for nefarious purposes: The Truman Show, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor. Then there were what you might call “Work sucks” movies: Fight Club, American Beauty and Office Space — in which the cubicle is a prison cell.

“That decade was so comfortable,” Mattis told Raftery. “The stock market was up, and people were making money. But there was a splinter in the mind’s eye: something felt wrong. In all of that comfort, people started thinking, ‘There’s something missing here.’” It’s no surprise that the film’s climactic song is Wake Up by Rage Against the Machine, the band who soundtracked the enormous protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle a few months later. Still, there’s a temptation to tell the filmmakers of 1999, y’know, things could be worse.

The Matrix also reminds us how new and raw the internet felt in 1999. Even with the first dotcom boom in full swing, online culture retained a freewheeling, anarchic energy. For many message-board users, the internet was an opportunity to craft a new identity from scratch and an online community could be far more rewarding — more real — than one in “meatspace”. Even within the Matrix, Thomas Anderson lives a double life as the hacker Neo, the hacker being the quintessential cyberpunk hero.

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One consequence of online culture that was already evident in 1999 was the spread of conspiracy theories. The Matrix, in which everything Neo knows about his life is indeed a lie propagated by a malign conspiracy, was a timely text. The last movie to use imagery from Lewis Carroll’s stories so prominently was Oliver Stone’s JFK. “This world has the Matrix all over the place,” Lana Wachowski said at the time. “People accept ways of thinking that are imposed upon them rather than working them out for themselves. The free-thinking people are those who question every sort of Matrix, every system of thought or belief, be it political, religious, philosophical.”

These are worthwhile questions to ask but the answers aren’t always pretty and the cult of The Matrix has taken a sinister turn. In 2012, a group of men’s rights activists founded a subreddit called TheRedPill. In The Matrix, the human explication machine Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) gives Neo two pills and a choice. “After this there is no turning back,” he says thrillingly. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”

Neo’s choice is a fable of courage, self-discovery, empowerment and radicalisation. To TheRedPill users, the idea of a world which favours men is the simulation and systemic bias against men is the reality. Feminists are the Agents, I guess. You can see why men’s rights activists might relate to Trinity’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) assessment of Neo: “I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.” He’s the discontented nerd who becomes a kick-ass messiah.

The metaphor has achieved broader popularity on the Right, from incels to Infowars, and QAnon to full-blown neo-Nazis, so much so that when Maroon 5 called their 2017 album Red Pill Blues, they had to clarify that they were simply Matrix fans and not fascist conspiracy theorists. Ironically, the red pill represents being awakened, which is also the meaning of woke.

There are, of course, other readings. To one group of fans, the red pill bears a suspicious resemblance to the brand of prescription oestrogen that was popular in the Nineties. Lana came out as a trans woman in 2012 (after a decade of rumours), followed by Lilly in 2016. Inevitably, this gave rise to the theory that The Matrix is a trans allegory, in which the “splinter in your mind, driving you mad” is gender dysphoria, names and bodies are mutable, and Morpheus is Neo’s therapist, guiding him into his new identity.

In 2016, Lilly approved of this theory in the-more-the-merrier terms, “because it’s an excellent reminder that art is never static” and “the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work”. Four years later, however, she went further: “That was the original intention but the world wasn’t quite ready.” The androgynous character Switch was originally intended to be a man in the real world and a woman in the Matrix. “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view,” Lilly said.

Yet this alone doesn’t justify one Atlantic writer’s bald claim that the film itself is “an allegory of gender dysphoria, as its creators have repeatedly said”. In fact, I couldn’t find a single mention of a trans subtext in any of the books about The Matrix published prior to Lana’s transition. The tortuous passages about it in gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce’s Trans are a good illustration of the problem with taking this idea too literally. To quote the trans writer Andrea Long Chu: “Allegorically is the least interesting way to read anything. Nothing ruins a question like an answer; the world is weirder than that.”

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An allegory is a story where the author’s message is coherent and undeniable. A myth is fluid and ambiguous, open to diverse and contradictory interpretations. In a revealing 2012 New Yorker profile, Lana Wachowski remembered being confused and frustrated as a child by the black monolith in 2001 until her father told her it was a symbol. “That simple sentence went into my brain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the same since,” she said. “Something clicked inside.” It’s not just that the monolith is a symbol; it’s that Kubrick refused to explain what it symbolised. It is more myth than allegory. In a single interview, Kubrick could have made the movie half as interesting.

The Wachowskis are not so taciturn. Last year, when Elon Musk tweeted “Take the red pill” and Ivanka Trump replied “Taken!”, Lilly tweeted back: “Fuck both of you.” I can see why the sisters might want to reimpose some authorial control over the meaning of The Matrix now that “all of it” includes some horrific stuff. Like Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog, they’ve seen their work appropriated by the far-Right and that can’t feel good. But the price of creating a modern myth is that it can’t be controlled — and any attempt to do so can only diminish it.

As some viewers prepare to unravel the ideas in Matrix Resurrections, it’s important to remember that the first movie is not a philosophical treatise but a wildly entertaining Hollywood spectacle. Of all the answers the Wachowskis have given to the eternal question “What is The Matrix about?”, my favourite is the most flippant: “It’s about robots vs kung fu.” True enough. If it weren’t also about that, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all.