Half of the fiction will come true !!!

I remember when I read and saw George Orwell’s 1984 in school. It was written in 1948. The movie and I think the book starts off with the following statement.

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.

Technologically everything Orwell anticipated nowadays is possible. Anyone can check out which car belongs to which persons. Cameras supervise traffic and number plates. Chips in passports tell almost everything. And Iceland’s population volunteered to create a huge gen-database.

The movie Matrix of the year 1999 first gave a vision of human and technological immersion. Artificial intelligence is dominating the human race and people live within a matrix, a simulated reality.

The most recent Pixar movie wall-E gives a slightly different future vision. The human population has to leave the planet due to extreme population, while robots are cleaning up earth. These machines as well developed intelligence and feelings. But the people chose voluntarily not to move their bodies anymore and live in a virtual reality not realizing their surrounding and people next to them. In the end it turns out that not all machines are good. In fact the main navigation robot rebels against the captain of the starship the human race had escaped in.

The movie points out current fears and threats to the human population, like the pollution of earth. But as well it gives a real vision of what might happen or is happening now with the evolution of technology. In the future time and place will not matter anymore. Research is done to create virtualized haptics.

Moreover technology immerses with the human body. Blind people get back their eyesight by implanting chips into the body.

Technologies get smaller, networks are available, and graphics get more and more realistic. The data processing is exceeding the abilities of human brains and data transfer is getting faster and faster.

I cannot see any reason, why a virtual reality will not become true. People already do live in a Second Life and make their dreams come true there.

But I really do not fear artificial intelligence. I have not heard of developing process units, bad computers or anything. Machines follow algorithms, we have feelings.

I think in the end it will be up to us if we want to spend the major part of our life in the matrix or in reality. And I am pretty sure there will always be a way to distinguish in which world ones in.

Don’t fear the future - look forward to it!