We are living in a reverse matrix

I have a habit I never decided to start.

I land on a web page. I press select all, then copy, and I throw the whole lot into a chat window. Menus, cookie banners, footers, half broken tables, the lot. To me it is a mess of characters. The AI reads it like clean prose and tells me what it says.

One day that gave me a strange feeling. I had seen this picture before.

In The Matrix, Cypher sits in front of the falling green code, and Neo asks if he always looks at it like that.

You get used to it. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.

Gobbledygook to us. A world to him.

That is my copied page exactly. Noise to me, meaning to the machine.

But the film has it pointing the other way from where we are standing.

In the film the human being is inside the computer. The world is the simulation. The body is in a tank somewhere, and the green code is the wall of the room.

What is happening now is the reverse. I am not in the computer. The computer has come out here. It sits in my world, reads my pages, runs my errands, and it is made out of my own language.

We are living in a reverse matrix.

Yuval Noah Harari said something close to this on The Ezra Klein Show, at 1:27:38. He was talking about immigration.

They are AI entities coming at the speed of light... The AI immigrants will take a lot of jobs. The AI immigrants will completely change the culture, even things like romantic relationships.

It is an analogy about machines, not about people. People who move countries bring skill and energy, and they build the places they land in. That is well documented and I believe it.

The part of the picture that holds is the arriving. Something has moved in next door, it is doing the work, and it is not visiting.

Later in the same conversation he goes further. He says AI may be language liberating itself, getting loose from the people who made it and starting to do things in the world on its own.

That is what I am pasting into, every time I copy a page I cannot read.

The green code was never written for us. The surprise is not that we cannot read it. The surprise is that it has come out of the screen to live here.