Roughly 2400 years ago, long before simulated realities, artificial intelligence, and red pills, the philosopher Plato imagined a group of people imprisoned inside a cave. They had been chained there since childhood. Unable to turn their heads, they could see only the wall in front of them.
Behind them burned a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners, objects were carried past, casting shadows onto the wall. The prisoners watched those shadows and called them reality. This doesn’t mean necessarily that they were fools, but it was because they had never seen anything else.
More than two thousand years later, “The Matrix” movie gave this allegory a modern body. It was not a cave made of stone, but a digital world. There were no chains around the neck, but cables connected to the mind. There were no shadows on a wall, but an entire simulated life.
They eat, they form relationships, they worry…
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