Neo, the hero of “The Matrix,” is sure he lives in 1999. He has a green-hued cathode-ray-tube computer screen and a dot-matrix printer. His city has working phone booths.
But he’s wrong: He lives in the future (2199, to be exact). Neo’s world is a simulation — a fake-out version of the late 20th century, created by 21st-century artificial intelligences to enslave humanity..
