Freeing everyone from The Matrix would be a logistical disaster

Freeing all the humans from the Matrix is dumber than animal activists who “free” caged animals, which then subsequently die in a wild environment they aren’t suited for because the activists didn’t think or plan any further than “free them all!”

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Yeah, my theory is similar, what they are doing with the humans could give them the same feeling we have when we whittle a piece of wood, or some sort of arts-related repetitive task. It can be something that has a practical application but most of the time is just a hobby that we feel some sort of compulsion/satisfaction cycle, and why wouldn’t AIs develop the same quirks?

Re: latest installment, spoiler alert,

My assumption is that the whole “batteries” thing was just something the machines made up because they didn’t want to admit that they were actually using humans to mine Bitcoin.

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In general - carnivores and omnivores make horrible foods sources because of the amount of high energy food they need to convert to mass that would in turn be converted to food.

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Meh. I really shouldn’t take all that much processing power to simulate the 1990s. I’m pretty sure most of the world was procedurally generated by that point anyway; lots of redundancy and pretty flat, really.

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That was my headcanon for the human batteries. It was just another simulation to filter out the troublemakers who might bring everything down. Make them so desperate to survive and busy freeing other people that they don’t think about how it doesn’t work in reality.

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Spoiler for Dan Simmons novels: In the Hyperion series it is eventually revealed that the TechnoCore, a mysterious AI civilization with godlike intelligence that presents itself as a benevolent ally of humanity, has secretly been exploiting humanity in just this way for centuries.

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I always felt like mentioning something along the lines of their code preventing them from killing humans so they enslaved them an efficiently worked around that one limitation would have at least offered some sort of explanation. Regardless, yeah, it’s not efficient at all that’s for sure.

I liked it. I didn’t expect it to be as ground-breakingly awesome as the original, because that’s just about impossible to achieve twice. I went in hoping for a good story in that universe, and and I enjoyed what I got out of it. I loved the different layers of contemplation on identity, aging, and self-doubt; I adored the meta self-awareness of the first half of the film; and I appreciated the resolution of the dangling plot threads from the trilogy. But YMMV, of course.

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It’s always good to free people from a metaphor.

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I’m fairly certain there’s dialog in the first movie about how most people over a certain age wouldn’t even be able to handle being disconnected from the Matrix, they’ve grown too used to it by a certain age. Neo himself was an outlier, normally a person his age wouldn’t be freed.

Figuratively, not literally.

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I haven’t yet read the third and fourth novels, but wasn’t the AI plan to fill the labyrinthine worlds with cruciform hybrids I suppose the advantages of scale outweigh the deleterious effect the parasite has on brains.

I think it was something like that. They just needed the raw processing capacity rather than the intellect.

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Machines also didn’t think to take all the biological matter that they must be farming to feed the humans, and then just “burn” that to produce more energy/heat than feeding that to humans. If they are just farming humans for heat energy then it’d be more efficient to cut out the person and remove a trophic level of inefficiency.

Or geothermal energy.

Or how about just rely on the fusion power that Morpheus mentioned in the first movie?

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Woah, deja-vu!

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I think the best way to understand this is that it was a lie that the machines believed, and the humans had no way of learning the truth. It would be better to say that humans were what gave the machines purpose.

At one time I thought the Matrix was a Disney venture that took “keeping them in the park” too literally, now I think the Matrix is simply a rebranding of FacebookMeta, the culmination of Zuck’s attempt to control our every waking hour.

Another theory that I floated was that the first inhabitants of the Matrix went voluntarily, to escape the hellscape that the last war had transformed the planet into. As a safeguard, it was designed so that machines could only draw power that flowed through the humans, thus ensuring the need to keep humans around.

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Exactly my take. There’s no reason to think that Morpheus has any real idea what he’s talking about, and the machines certainly have no incentive to clear the record.

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