At first glance, "Jenny" looks like a young, attractive Asian-American woman with a penchant for posting flirty photos and captions on her X account. Even if some of her features look a little enhanced – her skin is unnaturally smooth and her bust unusually large for her petite frame – it is easy to look past the slight uncanniness of her appearance in an era of widespread cosmetic procedures and photo editing tools. In fact, Jenny is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence-generated model, available for hire as an online influencer or virtual companion. Jenny is the brainchild of LushAI, a startup that bills itself as the world's first AI-powered modelling agency aiming to rival OnlyFans, the subscription-based website best known for hosting adult content creators. Jenny offers essentially the same services as the human content creators that make up OnlyFans, except she is powered by an algorithm – which means she can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

It took me a long process of reflection and self-adjustment to transcend all that. In this article, I detail the course of my first five years of experience, which started with grotesque innocence and led me to a satisfying form of maturity at the end. My engineering background gave me a fairly consistent and enriched algorithmic, mathematical and computer-science-based arsenal. I was trained to model a complex problem, in whichever domain I was involved with. My interlocutors until then were my professors. I trained myself and got used against my will to associate problems with complexity. Each time I was confronted with a new problem in a different subject, I added a new layer of complexity, in a view to maximizing my gratification in the form of an evaluation grade.

In "The Matrix," from 1999, Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, who pops a mysterious red pill proffered by an equally mysterious stranger and promptly discovers that his so-called life as an alienated nineteen-nineties hacker with a cubicle-farm day job has, in fact, been a computer-generated dream, designed--I swear I'm going to get all this into a single sentence--to keep Anderson from realizing that he's actually Neo, a kung-fu messiah destined to save a post-apocalyptic earth's last living humans from a race of sentient machines who've hunted mankind to near-extinction. Neo spends the rest of the film and its two sequels bouncing back and forth between the simulated world, where he's a leather-clad superhero increasingly unbound by physical laws, and the bleak real world, laid to waste by humanity's long war with artificial intelligence. Like "Star Wars" before it, "The Matrix" was fundamentally recombinant, unprecedented in its joyful derivativeness. Practically every cool visual or narrative thing about it came from some other mythic or pop-cultural source, from scripture to anime. And, like "Star Wars," it quickly became a pop-cultural myth unto itself, and a primary source to be stolen from.

As the millennium was about to turn, The Matrix arrived in theaters like a speeding bullet--or maybe a very slow-moving one, filmed with the then-novel extreme-slo-mo special effect that would become known as "bullet time." Digital technology played a much smaller role in most people's lives in 1999. The internet was still a novelty, used by most people mainly for sending and receiving email. Smartphones were nonexistent, music was still mainly listened to on CD, and Netflix was a two-year-old company primarily in the business of mailing movies on DVD to people's houses. The idea that all of humanity was trapped in a simulation, our physical bodies parked in life-sustaining pods while our daily lives unfolded in a virtual space run by distant evil overlords, still sounded like a cool science-fiction metaphor, not a description of banal everyday reality.

By Madhavi Lall As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more sophisticated, the threat that this automation will displace a wide number of jobs is very real. This obviously creates a distressing picture for many of us. However, evidence shows that if technology really destroyed jobs, there would have been no work today for anyone. The technological revolution we have seen in the past 30 years has been unparalleled and exponential, and yet there are more jobs today and probably better salaries than before. Therefore, we need to shift the dialogue from the type of jobs that can be protected to a conversation about jobs that can and will be created.