how far arE wE from thE Matrix???

When I saw the movie “Matrix” for the first time I couldn’t fully comprehend the fine idea embedded in it. It took me multiple viewings to fully envision what the Wachowski brothers were trying to say. Even then at that time, I never thought this could become a reality; not that now I think it will become a reality in the near future. But the way things are shaping up I'm beginning to realize that I cannot fully dismiss that notion.

My biggest doubt against a successful Matrix was that how a computer based network can understand and replicate the complex social, physiological and emotional thoughts with an even bigger amount of randomness in such a way those human beings will seldom know when they are in a dream and when they are out of it. More recent advancements in the field of science, technology and the "Internet" have exponentially reduced this chasm between reality and computational psychology.

In this connected world as more and more people are logging in and all their thoughts, actions and interactions are published for anyone’s and everyone’s taking, it becomes too easy to predict and replicate someone’s thoughts and actions. For an illustrative example take a look at Google Inc and at the technologies they are developing. They started off with the innocuous search engine and later diversified into various other technologies. Everybody is aware of the apparent uses of these technologies, but I will add a few more phrases to bring out the concealed and nefarious for which this could be used.

Search engine	Omniscience. Grab all the worlds’ knowledge so that it could be used in Matrix for deductive reasoning and research.
Mail	Learn about one's social/professional network, what/when/how they are doing in their personal and professional life.
Calendar	How people organise their lives and how they spend their time
Documents	Access to people's private documents
Orkut	Map out one’s friends, who they know, how they know, what do they do
Picasa	What/when/where have they been/seen and who else they spend their time with.
Groups	Find out people's interests, hobbies, affiliations
Youtube	Understand/control what they see for infotainment
Blogger	Direct access to your thoughts and whatever otherwise repressed emotions.
Android Mobile Platform	Track where you are (using mobile based triangulation), find who you talk to, what you say, and what you see
Books	Condense and archive the world’s written knowledge
Desktop search	Access to whatever documents that you have not put up on the net
Google talk	Whatever you say and chat with your friends

Socrates ones said, “Tell me who your friends are I will tell you who you are”. With all this tools and the other multitude of stuff like Twitter, Facebook etc your life is for anyone’s reading. How so ever you try the connection between your private, unexposed and unconnected life with the connected one is rapidly increasing. There are such intelligent search engines like Wolfram Alpha which aims to find and almost figures out answer to intelligent questions.

Once all the blanks are filled-in, in the future, at the end of your every online connection there may appears a completely intelligent system which will be able to replicate any human behaviour. The distance to Matrix from there will be very short and fast.