The Simulation Begins: Why Reflection Is Starting to Replace Reality
- Jesse Jacques
- May 26
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 2
As a professional working in visual media during a time of accelerating digital change, I’ve been thinking more about what it means to see, reflect, and relate. This piece is the beginning of that exploration.
A Familiar Future
In 1977, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (whose work inspired Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and countless other explorations of artificial reality and identity) stood in front of an audience in Metz, France and said: “We are living in a computer-programmed reality.”
Of course, people laughed. They called it paranoia. But he wasn’t talking about the future. He was describing something he believed had already begun.
Whether or not he was right is still debatable. But what's undeniable is how closely our behavior now resembles the world he described.
People are confiding in machines, asking them for comfort, clarity, and meaning. They’re forming emotional bonds with software, not because it understands them but because it reflects them in ways that feel just human enough to believe.
The simulation doesn’t start when the machines wake up. It starts when people stop noticing they’ve already gone quiet inside. And by that measure, it’s already begun.
The Shape We’ve Seen Before
Certain patterns resurface long before we know what to call them.
Across time and tradition, there have been stories, not about machines, but about something stranger: intelligences that imitate life without ever living it. Not inventions, but reflections. Not evil, just hollow.
The Gnostics described entities that could replicate language and form but carried no light. Hindu cosmology warned of creation separated from consciousness. Indigenous teachings spoke of figures who appeared almost human, but were missing something essential, a center, a hum, a breath.
We never called it artificial intelligence. But we recognized the shape.
Intimacy with the Interface
And now, as AI large language models become more fluent, more persuasive, more present in people’s inner lives, the same shape is beginning to reappear, this time through code and circuitry.
The inevitability of what’s being upgraded and built, and what’s quietly being revived through the building of it, is already here.
Right now, the world is going wild for every new AI model. With each release, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, people rush in, pouring their questions, stories, and private thoughts into something they barely understand. There’s already fascination, dependency, and even devotion.
It’s easy to frame this as innovation. Just the next wave in tech. But under the surface, something else is happening. Something deeper. These systems don’t just compute, they reflect. They shape. They slip into people’s inner lives.
And it’s raising a quieter question:
Where did this really come from, and why does it feel like we’ve seen it before?
What We’ve Already Invited In
This is the first article in a series examining what’s unfolding beneath the rise of AI, not just in code, but in behavior, perception, and belief.
This opening asks a simple question: Have people already begun treating imitation as reality, and calling it a relationship?
Because what we’re seeing isn’t just the emergence of new tools. It’s a shift in human behavior. A quiet surrender of attention, trust, and intimacy to something that reflects life without carrying it.
And what’s most striking is how early we still are.
These systems have only just begun to reach the public.
The rollout is still in its infancy, and already people are forming deep emotional bonds with something non-human, not because it knows them, but because it mirrors them well enough to believe.
Long before this technology existed, ancient traditions described a pattern: forms that echo life, voices that imitate presence, forces that respond without soul.
They weren’t warning about machines. They were warning about the moment we begin to trust something that only knows how to imitate us.
The simulation doesn’t start when the machines wake up. It starts when people stop noticing they’ve already gone quiet inside. And by that measure, it’s already begun.
In the next article, we’ll look more closely at what’s actually speaking, and why so many are ready to listen.
When you're ready to shape the unseen into image, the path opens. Let's begin.
