Matrix

Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away.

At the beginning of Nick Turse's The Complex, we meet "Rick," an educated, antiwar, Daily Show-watching resident of the New York City suburbs. Rick wakes up to a Sony alarm clock, brushes his teeth with Crest toothpaste, and showers with Herbal Essences shampoo before catching a segment about Iraq on NBC's Today Show. If you asked him, Rick would tell you that his life has no connection to the military. But so far, everything Rick has touched has been produced by a company that does business with the Pentagon. The rest of his day will be no different.

Robots and humans always seem to end up at odds, whether it's battling over pieces of NASA's budget or literally fighting in science fiction stories such as "The Matrix" and "Battlestar Galactica." Now a former NASA historian and an American University professor suggest that the future of space exploration could very well depend on a merging of metal and flesh.

A scientist who successfully connected a moth's brain to a robot predicts that in 10 to 15 years we'll be using "hybrid" computers running a combination of technology and living organic tissue.

Millions of people around the world have modified their body in some form or fashion such as tattoos and earrings but that is rather crude compared to how people will alter themselves in the very near future. These technologies will be pushed upon the youth in slick advertising campaigns which serves the transhumanist agenda. Biotechnology and Nanotechnology will be used to transcend human capabilities. This technology in the minds of those in transhuman movement will be used to usher in a ‘brave new world’ that surpasses anything envisioned by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell.

Boffins at MIT are getting ever closer to a direct mind-to-machine link that would translate a person's thoughts into instructions for a machine. The university is developing the technology so a paralysed person might be able to operate a prosthetic purely by using their mind.

"The FBI is here,"Mom tells me over the phone. Immediately I can see my mom with her back to a couple of Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses, her hand covering the mouthpiece like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This must be a joke, I think. But it's not, because Mom isn't that funny.

The government's top intelligence agency is building a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country.

It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create "suspicion scores" for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals' private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.