“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.
Humans are great computers, we’re just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It’s not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.
If it’s worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.
Human brains are excellent at computing certain things that are almost impossible for a regular computer. Having worked for years on computer vision I can tell you how hard it is to make computers realize simple stuff, heck, you need massive server farms just to do a basic object recognition that any 3 years old can already do. Sure, you can train a simple AI to recognize some objects, but it will never (currently) be as many objects or as precise as a person can instantly recognize.
The truth is human brains are excellent at what they evolved to do, i.e. pattern recognition. So much so that when trying to figure out data it’s usually easier to plot the data in many different ways to see if something shows up. In fact usually when you try to do cluster analysis the first machine result is, let’s say not great, but you can see that things are wrong and adjust the parameters.
As for your other point your brain does this automatically, they can just put a billboard with the thing they want analyzed and your brain (and millions of others) will give them the answer. Or they could use our dreams, even during sleep our brains are still active, and they could run any scenarios then. There are many other ideas, e.g. people playing videogames inside the matrix are actually controlling robots, or people working in forklifts are actually piloting construction robots in the real world, etc.
The original CPU idea was excellent, but computers weren’t so ubiquitous back then, and the producers thought that the audience wouldn’t understand it.
Also instead of Neo Jesus, when he kills the squiddies outside of the matrix, that should’ve been because they were still in there but Zion and co didn’t realise there was another layer to go.
Instead we got Revolutions.
Disagree, the “another layer” thing would be extremely lazy writing.
And “Neo has actual superpowers for no reason” wasn’t?
What do you mean “no reason”? IMO it was executed and explained well.
Neo having super powers in the matrix was explained. Not how he had them in “real life”.
I’ve seen this posted a few times but I could never find a source. I think this is just what people want to believe!
I love the explanation. “Human body heat combined with a firm of fusion generates electricity.”
So they have Fusion, and yet they’re relying on body heat. Yeah, makes a lot of sense everyone knows the human body is several hundred thousand degrees.