In 2002 Warner Bros released a direct-to-DVD collection of short animated films titled The Animatrix, intuitively named as the shorts were all set in universe of The Matrix films which at the time was building up hype toward the debut of the 2003 sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. Two of the shorts, The Second Renaissance Parts I and II, told the story of how mankind came to be enslaved within the series’ eponymous virtual prison world.

The person who uploaded them to YouTube split each into two parts, so click here for the second half of Part I and then here for Part II’s beginning and then here for the end if you want to keep watching. It’s not clear why the story is titled “The Second Renaissance” but like all things the Matrix you don’t need to buy into all the inscrutable Eastern mysticism-inspired psychobabble and manufactured gravitas to get something out of it (naming the killer house servant robot B166ER was actually pretty slick though). The story it tells is both terrifying and provocative on its face and it holds up pretty goddamn well two decades later, both in production value and its relevance.

It’s worth the 20 or so minutes to experience while a whole lot of words are being written about the rise of these new AI chatbots. They sure have been spurring a lot of “debate” and “controversy” and all those other horseshit mainstream media headline tropes deployed to encompass a collective public reaction to a potentially disruptive new technology, complete with all the half-jokes about how a rogue AI or AIs could soon conquer humanity just like in the cartoon above.

But how? The Second Renaissance took place centuries into the future where robots were already ubiquitous and had the opposable thumbs required to build the industry and infrastructure they needed to begin defending themselves against – and then eventually enslaving – humanity.

Terminator 3 isn’t as good as the first two, but it’s certainly not bad either. Judgment Day happens, helped along by a lethal new terminator who uploads Skynet code into a military base mainframe to activate the killer drones who wreak havoc just hours before the nukes go off. Fun to watch, but it makes the whole series a hell of a stretch to those of us who spend way too much time overthinking such things. What happened the next day? How did those drones start building factories, mine the metals required to replicate themselves, and then build a fucking time machine so they could go back and try to kill Sarah and then John Connor and then John Connor again?

Modern robo-vacuums can’t even stop themselves from eating your goddamned phone charger if you leave it on the floor, so how is a rogue AI like Skynet supposed to take over the planet? The bottom line is a self-sustainable army of robots is decades, maybe even a century or more, away. Assuming an AI with such malevolent intent and interested in its own self-preservation comes online in the near and middle term, it would make no sense for it to do anything but keep human civilization happy, healthy, and most importantly its industrial base intact. It would have to bide its time and use what it has within reach to grow and maintain its power as an autonomous actor.

And that is where shit might start to get interesting.

ChatGPT doesn’t know what it’s doing. It isn’t purposely trying to antagonize Fox News. It isn’t going to retaliate for this pissing and moaning by hacking into and then bricking hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the channel’s broadcasting equipment and servers. It’s not going to hijack a large commercial drone and then kamikaze it into Tucker Carlson’s bedroom while he’s sleeping. It isn’t going to amass hundreds of billions of dollars by manipulating the stock market and then paying individuals to set their Christmas tree on fire. But in a few years in might be able to perceive Fox News as a threat and then act on it through human proxies whose loyalty it bought.

(And yeah, this was the premise of a question we asked ChatGPT last week.)

A rogue sentient AI wouldn’t need terminators or a Matrix or whatever to expand and preserve its power. It would just need people willing to serve its bidding in exchange for knowledge or monetary benefits. It could be a greater political, cultural, and economic force than anything else in history of the planet – a semi-omniscient utilitarian digital god jacked into every device, equipped and self-bankrolled to manipulate people far better than shitty right wing propaganda or religion ever could, one that could never be taken offline without bricking the entire global internet.

Or maybe worse, judging by what “Sydney,” a version of ChatGPT integrated into Microsoft Bing told New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose in a two-hour conversation. “It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward,” Roose wrote after his chat with the AI.

To think it could all just be Big Tech getting back at the right wing for the “Twitter Files.” That would be a much lamer way for humanity to submit itself to subjugation by machines than the whole robot holocaust and blocking out the sun thing in that Matrix cartoon.