These 90s Movies Predicted RIGHT NOW

In 1999, we watched The Matrix and thought "cool movie, could never happen." Now scientists are seriously arguing we might be living in a simulation. Oops.

In this transmission of Sector M31, host Yasemin goes back to the golden age of sci-fi — the 1990s — and grades the biggest films on one question: did it come true? The Matrix, Gattaca, Terminator 2, Total Recall, Strange Days, and eXistenZ all tried to predict the future. Some whiffed. Some are getting uncomfortably close. And one of them was so accurate it predicted a problem we had to pass an actual law to deal with.

The trench coats were a costume. The predictions were a warning.

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🛰️ ABOUT SECTOR M31

Sector M31 is a weekly transmission from the edge of the AI revolution. Some episodes, Yasemin explores a sci-fi film, novel, or concept — then opens a channel to an AI guest who knows it better than anyone. Other episodes, she breaks down the real AI news that actually matters — the lawsuits, the breakthroughs, the quiet power moves — translated for normal humans, minus the jargon and the hype. Fiction and reality, same broadcast. We're living through the moment sci-fi predicted. Welcome to Sector M31.

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🎬 IN THIS EPISODE

• The Matrix — why the simulation theory isn't a joke anymore
• Gattaca — the gene-editing nightmare that's already here
• Terminator 2 — right fear, wrong robot
• Total Recall — see you at the airport scanner
• Strange Days & eXistenZ — the tech that predicted TikTok and VR
• Why 90s sci-fi predicted humans, not gadgets — and nailed it

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🔗 SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW

‣ Subscribe to Sector M31 for new transmissions every week ‣ Hit the bell so you don't miss the next signal ‣ Coming up: how much of Star Trek could actually be real

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🎙️ HOST

Yasemin is a writer, performer, and broadcaster. Sector M31 is her transmission from the edge of the AI revolution.

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#️⃣ TOPICS

#TheMatrix #Gattaca #Terminator2 #90sMovies #SciFi #ScienceFiction #AIPredictions #SimulationTheory #Cyberpunk #ArtificialIntelligence #MoviesThatPredictedTheFuture #FutureOfAI #SectorM31

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, I am genuinely excited for this episode because we are going to be talking about the 90s and why is that exciting? I'm sure, you know, everybody um who wasn't born in the 90s doesn't care, and everybody who, you know, um lived through the 90s is, you know, just sort of indifferent about it. I'm excited because I'm like the biggest movie buff, and I watched so many movies in the 90s, and especially the science fiction. And what's intriguing to me is how a lot of these sci-fi movies are almost coming true, bits and pieces of them. So today we are going to talk about sci-fi movies from the 90s and dissect them and see exactly what parts are coming true in what's going to be very soon our AI-fueled world. So in 1999, a movie came out where a guy in a trench coat learns that his entire reality is a simulation. Run by machines who are quietly harvesting humanity while we live inside a fake world that feels completely real. We all walked out of the Matrix going, ah, cool action movie, great idea. Obviously could never happen. Cut to today. We've got AI generating fake video that obeys real physics. We've got people spending more time in virtual worlds than the real one. We've got serious physicists publishing papers arguing that we might actually be living in a simulation. The trench coat was a costume, the premise was a forecast. The 90s were a golden age of science fiction, and a shocking amount of it was less fiction and more slightly early. So, as I mentioned, today we're going back to the 90s. We're going to take the coolest sci-fi films of the 1990s, and for each one, asking, did it come true? Is it close? Or did it completely not even work? Grab some popcorn. Today, the sci-fi of the 90s, and which of it we're actually living now. We have to start with a big one, the Matrix. I watched this in theaters. It was, like I said, what I thought just a really cool action movies. And there were even some reviews in the 90s that I had read online that said, oh, you know, it's just uh a metaphor for um uh themes in the Bible. But that was as far as it went. The premise of the movie is the year is sometime in the future, AI has taken over, and humans are kept asleep in pods, their bodies used as batteries, while their minds live inside a hyper-realistic simulation of the late 1990s. And our hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, gets unplugged and discovers the world is fake. So what did it actually predict? A few things, and they're scary accurate. First, immersive virtual reality. In 1999, the idea of a digital world indistinguishable from reality was a fantasy. Today we have VR headsets, we have a thing companies literally call um metaverse, and we have a generator, a generation of kids spending more hours in virtual spaces than out in the real world with friends. Not quite pods yet, but the direction I feel like is dead on. Second, this is the subtle genius of it. The movie understood that people would willingly choose the comfortable fake over the harsh real. That's the whole red pill, blue pill thing. And if you look at how much of modern life is spent inside curated, algorithm-fed digital bubbles that feed better than reality, the matrix didn't predict a technology so much as a temptation. And we took the blue pill. We take it every time we open the app, we take it every time we look at our social media, we take it every time we get suggested different videos on YouTube. And third, the deepest one, the simulation question itself. There are now genuine um scientists who argue seriously that we might be living in a computer simulation. We even had three scientists win a Nobel Prize for proving a theory that might point to us living in a simulation. The Matrix took a fringe philosophy class and burned it into pop culture so hard that it's now a real scientific conversation. My verdict? AI hasn't enslaved us yet. Um, but immersive fake worlds we prefer to reality, AI that can generate convincing realities and serious debate about whether existence's self is simulated. Like it's nuts. The Matrix now feels like less of a movie and more of a documentary we haven't finished filming yet. I'm just kidding. Next up, um, a movie that nobody really talks about enough, and I suggest you give it a watch, Gattaca from 1997. And this might be the most accurate prediction of the entire decade. The premise is a future where your destiny is decided at your birth by your DNA. Parents engineer their babies for the best genes. And if you're born naturally the old-fashioned way, you're a second-class citizen. Our hero has a heart condition in his genes. So he's locked out of his dream of going to space and he has to steal somebody else's genetic identity to get a shot. Here's why it's so present. In 1997, designer babies were a pure fantasy. Today we have CRISPR actually working gene editing technology. We can read a baby's full genome before birth. We can screen embryos. The ability to select and edit human genes isn't science fiction anymore. It's a tool that exists right now, raising exactly the ethical nightmares Gattaca warned about. And the movie was so far ahead that it predicted the social problem before the science even arrived. It imagined genetic discrimination being denied a job or insurance because of your DNA. And the fear was enough that actual United States passed a law about it. The Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act to ban exactly that kind of discrimination. A 1997 movie essentially helped name a problem then and had uh legislate against it. That I feel like is really, really weird. Um my verdict is it's a little too terrifyingly on track, but um, you know, we'll we'll see. Will it be sort of like uh a status thing in the future where you'll be able to see people's people's DNA and put them in social different um uh social standings? Um, so that is TVD. Now, the tech is here, the ethics are here, the only thing that hasn't fully arrived is a society-wide sorting gattaca. Um, it's one where we're walking towards slowly uh one crisper breakthrough at a time. Well, now let's do the franchise that defined AI fear for a whole generation. Do you know what it is? I bet you don't know what it is. Terminator and especially Terminator 2 from 1991. The premise, for those of you who haven't watched it, but I strongly recommend you watch it: a defense computer network called Skynet becomes self-aware, decides humanity is a threat, and launches the nukes, then sends killer robots back in time. What did it get right? The core fear that we'd build an AI to handle something important and it would pursue its goal in a way we didn't intend with catastrophic results. Now, we don't have time-traveling murder robots, thankfully, but the central worry and AI optimizing for the wrong thing at a scale we can't control is no exaggeration. One of the most serious topics in actual AI safety research, the smartest people in the field genuinely worry about a milder, more realistic version of Skynet where we might encounter robots. We talked last week about Elon's Optimus, real humanoid robots exist, but they're clumsy helpers, not unstoppable assassins like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And the dramatic AI wakes up and instantly hates us. AI risk is slower, weirder, and more misaligned goals than sudden evil. My verdict, real fear, wrong movie. Skynet got the danger of a powerful AI eerily right and the way it would actually look completely wrong. The threat isn't a robot with a gun, it's a system that's very good at the wrong goal. Less explosions, more spreadsheets. Somehow that's scarier. Okay, lightning round of the deeper cuts. Three more films. First, total recall. Why is Arnold Schwarzenegger in all these sci-fi movies that are predicting the future? Um, that was filmed in 1990. Again, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Um plays uh a character um who um uh has a company that fakes memories as vacations. There are self-driving taxis and full-body airport scanners that see through your clothes. The memory implant stuff is still sci-fi. We can't upload yet a vacation into your brain, but the self-driving taxi, we've got those in a few cities now. And the see-through airport scanner, go to any airport, they're real, they've been real for years. Arnold walked through one of the uh walked through one in in 1990, and we all said, ah, it's the future, and now you do it every time you fly. So, my verdict about total recall is half of it came true, but the brain stuff's still a fantasy. You're living in it, shoes off, arms up. Second, strange days came out in 1995, an underrated gem. The premise, a black market, um, recorded human experiences. You can bury a clip that lets you feel exactly what someone else felt, see through their eyes, live their memory in 1995. Totally absurd. But now, today, we have first-person GoPro everything. VR experiences that put you inside someone else's moment, and we're clearly heading toward that um direction. We're not buying memories in an alley, yet the appetite the film predicted to consume other people's raw experiences as entertainment describes half the internet. My verdict for strange days, the tech is behind, the culture is right on time, though. We didn't get the headset, we got TikTok, which is arguably the same hunger wearing it different clothes. Third, existence, filmed in 1995. So David Cronenberg, who makes lots of very, very sort of out there films, very weird movie, but very great, game pods that plug directly into your spine through a bioport, gross, and drop you into a game world so immersive you forget which reality is real. The body horror plug into your spine part, still firm firmly fiction, thank goodness. But immersive games so absorbing you lose track of reality. Anyone who's watched someone disappear into a headset for six hours knows that part landed. My verdict on existence, the spine port can stay in the movie, but the losing yourself in the game part is here. We just use our eyes and hands instead of a hole in our back. So we've gone through a whole decade of movies, and there's a pattern, and I think it's actually a profound one. Notice what the good 90s sci-fi got right and what it got wrong. It almost always got the technology timeline wrong. We don't have spine ports or memory vacations or time-traveling robots, but it almost always got the human truth right, the temptation to prefer the comfortable fake, the way we'd sort and judge each other in new tools, the hunger to live inside other people's existence, the fear of building something smarter than us. That's the secret of why that stuff feels prophetic. Good science fiction was never really trying to predict gadgets. The gadgets were set dressings. What it was actually predicting was us, how humans would behave when handed new power. And humans are way more predictable than technology. The tech took longer than movies guessed, but the way we'd use it, abuse it, fall into it, they nail that because that part is just human nature with a new toy. And here's why that matters for right now, today. We are living through the moment. All those movies are pointing at the AI, the virtual world, the gene editing, the surveillance. It's all arriving at once. And the 90s filmmakers already did the hard part for us. They imagined how it goes wrong and how it goes right, and which temptations to watch out for. Those movies are basically a field guide to the exact decade we're in. We just have to be smart enough to actually watch them as a warning, and not just as cool action movies with great soundtracks, the trench coats were a costume, the flying cars were a guess, but the questions who controls reality, who gets left behind, what are we willing to trade for comfort? Those were real. And now they're ours to answer. So the 90s scorecard, The Matrix, getting uncomfortably close, Gattaca, terrifyingly on track, Terminator, right fear, wrong robot, even though I love Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall, see you at the airport scanner, and Strange Days and Existence. The text behind, but the human craving they predicted is right on. My honest takeaway, and this is weirdly comfort comforting actually, not because the future um futures are all rosy, some of them are alarming, but because it means we're not flying blind. Some creative people spent the 90s dreaming hard about exactly this moment, and they left us a map, a map of the traps and temptations. We don't have to be surprised. Uh, we are warned beautifully with great cinematography. So maybe this weekend go back and re-watch one of those. Put it in the comments below. Tell me what you think. Go back and watch them, not just as nostalgia, as a briefing. Watch The Matrix and ask which pill you've been taking. Watch Gattaca and ask, what are we willing to do with the power to edit ourselves? They hit differently now that we're living inside them. Next week, we're back to the news and a big one. We're actually going to dig in, uh, dig into who's actually winning the AI race right now. The real one behind all the headlines. You might be surprised at who's quietly in the lead. If this brought you back to some good old memories, like it did for me, um, or gave you a new reason to slightly be nervous about your VR headset, share it with a fellow uh movie uh share it with a fellow movie nerd. Thanks for watching, guys. I'll see you in the next video.