IT Brew Movie Club: ‘The Matrix’ (1999)

If you thought you had issues with AI, wait ’til you hear about this movie The Matrix.

For anyone living under a simulation of a rock for the past quarter century, here’s the plot: Neo (Keanu Reeves) discovers AI has defeated humanity, and virtually all humans are kept in a digital version of the long-destroyed world (the matrix) while unknowingly serving as batteries for their machine overlords.

Whoa.

Will Roper, CEO of AI-native engineering firm Istari Digital and distinguished professor at Georgia Tech, saw the 1999 movie in theaters. Roper sees the value in IT professionals, like Neo, choosing to push design boundaries, question outputs, and see exciting technologies like AI as just math and code.

There is no car. A memorable scene in The Matrix involves a boy bending a spoon.

Neo, following his training on virtual-world navigation, awaits wisdom from a figure called The Oracle. Instead, he learns something from the kid in The Oracle’s living room who’s messing with the silverware.

“Don’t try to bend the spoon,” the boy advises. “Realize the truth…there is no spoon.”

When Roper got a virtual tour of the headquarters of the McLaren racing team in 2020, as a then-senior acquisition executive of the US Air Force and Space Force, he saw engineers gaining extraordinary capabilities through virtually simulating vehicles that weren’t technically there. The entire racing ecosystem was modeled end to end, so a decision in the digital world “traced nearly one-to-one to the physical world.”

“There wasn’t a single part of racing that wasn’t represented digitally, and it gave them superpowers like Neo had in The Matrix,” he said.

The meeting inspired Roper to write an essay encouraging the military to use similar techniques. The Pentagon adopted digital engineering two years later. (Companies like CVS Health have been similarly experimenting with digital twins.)

There is no machine. The Matrix presents a war between man and machine. While lawmakers In April explored their automation angst and the possibility of AI destroying us all, Roper sees this fear as personifying something that’s basically math.

AI, he added, is a vector “projected through some house-of-mirrors mathematical space that outputs a vector that gets converted back into a language or code we understand.” It feels amazingly human, but it isn’t.

That code can lead to disastrous consequences. While Roper mentioned the idea of humanity-destroying AI feels “not likely,” he does consider the real risks in areas like cybersecurity, particularly in the context of agents that can be run without human supervision: “What will viruses and worms on the internet be if they get where they’re auto-improving and fighting back?”

Bending the rules. Neo’s mentor Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) says, “What you must learn is that these rules [like gravity] are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.” But can code really be broken in a way that’s effective or produces anything other than error messages?

Code is not a law of science, Roper says: There are almost always ways to force unintended consequences from that code, including software’s many vulnerabilities and zero days. AI is no different.

“The AI has its intended uses that the humans who built it wish for but ultimately, it’s code implementing math, and that math has allowances that our intentions would otherwise wish we didn’t have,” Roper said.

Even an approved system, Roper noted, must be constantly probed—and that’s the role of today’s IT pro. (IT Brew spoke with AI pros recently about the importance of human-in-the-loop testing.)

Particularly in the case of AI, Roper sees today’s tech practitioners as the ones who can guide the technology: set guardrails, build trusted data sources, and handle hallucinations.

It’s on human collaborators to provide the guidance and training to deliver desirable answers, Roper added: “Humans have to be the producer in the booth. Whatever gets recorded, we still have to run the EQ, the mixing, the dubbing, and ultimately decide whether it’s safe to release.”

The inner workings of today’s most fascinating technologies—from race cars to AI chatbots—require architects and producers who can expand their reality and bend them the right way.

For more IT Brew movie club, check out our dive into Hackers, Sneakers, Blackhat, and Skyfall.