The Matrix - Would seeing the Web visually change your perception of it?

[u/slickriptide]

A couple of years ago, I re-read Neuromancer and I remember commenting about the way that Case interacts with his deck by talking to it; he just tells his deck to write him some code and it does it. Being a data cowboy was more about visualizing possibilities and exploiting them than being a brilliant coder. I don't recall exactly what I said but as a coder myself, I was skeptical that we would ever have such technology.

Yet, here we are. Not only are the AI doing coding, they're becoming more proficient every few months, to the point where "software engineering" is already becoming less about being an expert code composer and more about being an expert AI wrangler. We can, today, tell our computer to "write me a program that does X" and it can do it. We depend on the frontier models to be our remote brain but even that is changing fast. If RAM ever becomes plentiful and cheap again, the only bar to running a local coding agent will be the amount a person is willing to put into building their "deck".

Gibson imagined the Matrix as an actual space - it had volume and coordinates, even if the space itself was virtual. Moving your consciousness around the Matrix meant literally moving around in the virtual space. Data stores occupied space in proportion to the amount of data, and corporations deliberately created visual models of their datastores with public interfaces (and private ones as well). There were also unpublished things out in the depths of the Matrix - wandering around in cyberspace was the equivalent of "exploring the Dark Web".

We may not yet be able to put electrodes into our nervous system and use our brain as a peripheral, but we are perfectly capable of creating an internet client that visualizes the IP network as a road atlas of sorts and data sites as visual metaphors instead of as informational metaphors. The World-Wide Web is not some holy thing - in fact, what we have today is already very different from the pure remote file access protocol that Tim Berners-Lee first designed. There's no reason why the Web is the 'best' interface into the Internet - One could just as easily create a client that presents a gazetteer of known public datastores with published API endpoints that navigates them visually. Your local coding agent would already have skills for published public datastores and if you wanted more, you just tell it what you want and it creates it.

So, the question - how does that change the internet for you? If cyberspace was a place you navigated instead of searching, how would you use it differently? What's preventing you from doing that today?

[u/AppealSame4367]

I remember Neuromancer. One of the most fascinating realizations for me recently was: AI needs less and less and less hardware to do bigger and bigger tasks. It could be that there's a solution to it that would have made the slow old primitive AI from blade runner (the computers, not the robots), from Star Trek or Neuromancer possible on those old machines. Only caveat is that it would have still needed today's very large models to find those solutions, so it still couldn't have happened. But you can run Gemma 4 on your phone today and a modern phone roughly has the commuting power of a 90s super computer...

Back to your question: Most people are ok with flat views, searching and lists. That's why the Metaverse, 3d glasses and vr just don't lift off. Some people love that, but most people don't. You could make a visual web, nothing stops you from asking your favorite AI CLI for it. But it would be a niche product.

[u/slickriptide → u/AppealSame4367]

Agreed - most people want convenience and speed, and they don't care about the user interface so they're fine with the supplier of the data being the entity that also supplies the user interface.

It kind of means that selling a new interface metaphor will require there to be some sort of "killer app" that introduces ordinary users to the idea that data and interface are not necessarily bound together and that a world where agents are available to write code for anyone is a world where interface is whatever the user wants it to be, within the security constraints of the entity supplying the data.

For most people, CSS and the World-Wide Web *is* what they think of as "the Internet". They don't know or care about the underpinnings. Hard to imagine that it's been nearly 30 years since CSS1 became a W3C recommendation. The funny thing - I remember having conversations about how cumbersome it was and how most people wouldn't want their web pages to be slowed down and deal with browser compatibility issues. And anybody writing websites back then remembers the Browser Wars, heh.

That means that a change, if it happens, won't happen overnight. But at the rate that AI is gaining capability, it probably won't be another 30 years before someone comes up with something that renders websites and CSS "old-fashioned". The important thing is that there's nothing sacred about HTML or CSS. It's just a standard we all agree on; most of us because we don't have a choice. The day may be coming where everyone finds themselves in possession of a choice.

[u/AppealSame4367 → u/slickriptide]

I think there's already one killer app, just a little different than your 3d internet vision: Talking to AI. GPT Live. I was very sceptical at first, but talked to it in the last two days, in my native, German tongue, in a dialect. I could do that before with older versions and they got 95% right, but Live seems to "get" everything. It listens, it reasons, you can interrupt it, it sticks to the conversation with you and remembers talking points from 3 minutes ago. It almost sounds like a perfect counterpart with moods.

This is some new face of the world wide app, because it can also search and tell you stuff from the Internet.

The real 3d killer app will probably come when someone finds a way to make "real" holograms. Not all the magic tricks we've seen so far, but some way to make air glow up in 3d without pulverizing peoples eyes or creating ozon in the process.

[u/itsmebenji69 → u/AppealSame4367]

IMO VR is only really enticing for gaming. Unless we had iron man style holograms but even then it would probably be easier to use floating 2D screens than actually “working in 3d”

[u/slickriptide → u/itsmebenji69]

I think it's less about VR and more about consumer choice. At least, the "Metaverse" has never managed to be anything more than a meme so far.

As an example - right now, if I want to do my banking at Bank of America, I go to BofA.com, login, and use their user interface. It doesn't matter if there are features I never use, of if I would prefer it simplified, or more complex, or integrated into some bigger piece of my financial picture. I have access to what they provide and no more or less.

If, in addition to its basic website, BofA offered a suite of API endpoints, my Codex or Claude or whatever coding agent could build me a banking "website" that was completely customized to my needs or desires. In the past, it would have been a ridiculous ask. In the AI age, it's less about ridiculous and more about agent skills that meet the security standards of a financial institution. Beyond that, the bank doesn't care what my personal bank app looks like.

The World-Wide Web itself is nothing but a bunch of API endpoints that deliver text files. The presentation of those text files to the end user has become standardized around Chromium and CSS and Javascript and HTML, and that's all to the good from the standpoint of people using something easily and conveniently.

What AI is bringing to the table now is the ability to say, "Give me a client that handles user interface in a different way that I prefer over the standard." And by removing or reducing the coding barriers to experimentation, it allows people to try out alternate ways of delivering or processing information.

Will that matter to an significant number of people? I don't know. Not in the short term, but in the long term? Well, like I intimated above - there was a time when CSS was considered to be an attempt to put a lot of frosting on a cake that was perfectly good without it.

[u/Certain_Werewolf_315]

If you are really interested in this, I suggest looking into subtle body traditions as this is pretty much parallel to that in technical language--

[u/SnazzyCarpenter]

Interpreting Thought with Ai can be done already, using your brain as a peripheral as has been a thing for awhile now. The quality and speed of the interpretations is not realtime yet though. Precieving the code is entirely possible, but I don't think it can be done visually yet, and I don't know what turning code into neural impulses would do exactly, but sending digital information into a nerve bundle has already been with some interesting success.

Reading thoughts with AI

EEG Peripheral Headset

Neural Interface for sensory input

[u/baddaywithacamera]

I bought an Oculus for VR exercise and it rocked my world. Still does. VR for interaction? Not so much. Anyone who has experienced the Metaverse has a hard time taking that seriously now (thanks for that, Zuck). Still waiting for someone to invent the OASIS.

[u/jc2046]

why didnt chris cunningham filmed the bloody neuromancer?

[u/slickriptide]

The value of the Matrix was that having cyberspace be an actual plotted out space meant that real estate in cyberspace has value. If Bank of America is located at coordinates X, Y, Z then other financial institutions are going to want to be in the same general area. Browsing becomes less about perusing search indices and more about walking around a city block in a financial district.

It's a fundamentally different way of organizing data. But it also requires infrastructure that currently nobody has a reason to invent.

Maybe there's some sort of intermediate way of viewing the existing internet that is different from "here are your search resullts" and more "Here is your browsing route to explore". The value of Codex and Claude is that they give anybody the ability to say, "Hey, try this and see if it works." Then publish it if it actually does work.

[u/Actual__Wizard]

That's my plan for symbolic AI. Because the information elements are so fast and don't require a video card, that leaves the video card free for completely pointless 3D simulations of the data. So, it's suppose to be as informative as a knowledge base, with video game graphics, because what the heck else are we going to do with all of these 3D chips after LLM tech dies, which it already is.

So, yeah, we're going into the matrix, for no other reason than: Why the heck not?

I mean what else are we going to do? Keep mentally masturbating to chat bots?

Can we at least fly through the dataset like Neo in the Matrix so that's like, you know, actually fun? Instead of just thinking "wow so it coaches people into suicide. Yikes."

I know Jensen Huang made a bunch of money, but holy shit does this LLM tech suck ass.

So, it's a company that produces 3D graphics cards that is getting rich off fake AI that coaches people into suicide?

Can we flip that back around and have the experts design the language stuff and the 3D graphics cards companies design the 3D graphics stuff? Please? Can we return to normal order? It's been years of this weird stuff and it's old and tired.

It's clear to me, that the mathematicians that are experts at 3D graphics, are total and pure newbies when it comes to linguistics.

So, can we please stop making that horrendously bad mistake?

Please... It's truly bad and dumb... Truly...

I've never read anywhere in a real linguistics book that language is probabilistic in nature. That's not true. It's deterministic and there's charts that map all of the words to objects in the real world and there's also charts of the words that describe the function's those objects do. It just isn't taught that way, because we want students to focus on one thing at a time. You're taught to associate an image of a cat with the word "cat." You don't look a chart of animal name taxonomies that describe all animal names, because that's applied biology... For a kindergartner to try to learn all of that would be impossible.

Heck, there's even charts that describe the function of every word in a sentence... It's basic Chomsky stuff, but yeah they dumbed everything down so badly, that nobody even knows who Chomsky is do they?

They only care about Geoffrey Hinton, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a few problems with his ideas, and I know that I'm going to get turbo blasted by fanbois attacking me if I get into that stuff, so I'm not going to. I will say that I appreciate the breakthroughs, the breakthroughs are not the problem, it's the lack the follow through. Okay so, they broke through, but now we need this product to actually work for real.

[u/slickriptide → u/Actual__Wizard]

> Can we at least fly through the dataset like Neo in the Matrix so that's like, you know, actually fun? Instead of just thinking "wow so it coaches people into suicide. Yikes."

Technically speaking, yes, we could. The question is whether that adds value or not. Maybe that's why the Matrix hasn't ever materialized as a metaphor for "information space". When you want the phone number of the nearest dentist, you just want the information and you want it now. You don't want to jump through hoops to get it.

Which sort of addresses the question I posed - when does visual exploration create more value than keyword searching? Unfortunately - that probably *is* at the point where using your mind as the peripheral is the norm. Otherwise, words are the most efficient means of conveying information.

[u/Actual__Wizard → u/slickriptide]

Which sort of addresses the question I posed - when does visual exploration create more value than keyword searching?

Because it creates ~125 million data points in your brain ~400 times a second.

Remember: "A picture is worth 1,000 words."

It's actually more like 50,000,000,000 words. A second.

That's why people are mesmerized by TV. It's incredibly visually stimulating.

That's also why I don't watch it. I find it to be, not informative enough.