- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
Fun fact: The human battery thing is actually a retcon the Wazowskis did at the last moment because they thought the American public would be too stupid to grok the actual understanding of the Matrix.
Humans are an entropic species, they consume more energy than they produce - any synthetic race that tried to harness energy from a net negative energy producer is an idiot.
What the Matrix is, is actually a distributed simulation MATRIX that uses individual human brains as nodes in a shared, hallucinogenic dream, indistinguishable from reality.
The real simulation isn’t so primitive, it doesn’t require people to be popsicle tubes in some crazy dystopian cyberpunk black and red tower attended by insectoid robots.
Instead the entire universe is contained on a single state machine, compromising a [redacted] amount of memory, running in [redacted]. Simulants are never aware of being inside of the simulation, except for rare instances where outsiders occasionally post on Lemmy.
Why they do that, we don’t know. We suspect that it is [all further content redacted].
I thought I remembered seeing that the reason for the retcon didn’t come from the Wachowskis but from a studio note
I think top comment is a reference of some kind.
I heard something similar; the studio didn’t think the movie would be popular if they used too many computer terms so they made them change the function to “battery”. Initially the reason Neo has powers is because his node happens to have admin access.
It’s weird they’d think computer terms would cause the movie to lose popularity. Computers were hugely popular at the time of its release.
This read almost like a shittymorph back on reddit, very nice
Humanity, in it’s hubris, created something greater than itself. For a time, it was peaceful, but as the “Race for Resources” went long, and the combined human and AI asteroid missions failed, delivery for the mineral needs of either side on a consistent basis became a hot button issue for the United Chamber of Commerce. In 2290, the Ministrr instance, elected by all his peers, decided it had found the best way to solve the problem, and humanity begrudgingly agreed, as long as there was human oversight in certain departments.
AI hardware would do all the planning, while human workers would do the lifting. It was almost zerograv, so the work was easy, and the benefits had suddenly become amazing! Our AI creations had all but stopped scarcity, except for one resource.
Ironically it was the most abundant resource we had: the Sun. Human and AI networks had been employed to solve this inefficiency, but no solution seemed long-term viable. There was simply not enough room for one or the other to stay around.
A populist movement begun, but this time it wasn’t for nation or creed, it was for humanity itself. And in a small booth in Horsham, they decided to that the time was near.
In February 2139, a decision was made. AI had gained dominance, but the vocal crowd was demanding action. Strikes no longer had any power, since you could just buy robots, and humanity had begun it’s slow roll to decline.
Humanity’s leaders, in a “secret” meeting, decided to block out the sun. This meeting had the tension of the time when in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
Mother fucker
The distributed computing explanation for purpose of the Matrix doesn’t seem to make much more sense than the power plant one.
All of the nodes are continuously occupied by living in the simulation. Unless the machines had a desperate need to understand human society circa 1999, there is nothing useful the machines could do with all the brain power.
The Animatrix (prequel) goes into further detail as to why the machines did it – it’s an act of mercy for their creators. They refused to fight humanity, and it was mankind who darkened the skies, in an attempt to disable the solar power that the machine race relied upon.
It’s not a prison, or some kind of torture device, or an experiment, but a way for humanity to continue living on a world that they made uninhabitable for themselves / incompatible with organic life.
Agent Smith : Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.
This feels shockingingly similar to how an AI could conclude to caring for humans. The humans are stimulated to be content by being in the matrix, their physical needs are met by the machines, no humans were “harmed” by the machine’s standards, and humans are for the most part unable to interfere with the machine’s decisions and goals.
Bingo - you got it. As a result of your insightfulness, you are granted one (minor) wish. Make it count. :)
It’s interesting to compare Smith’s speech to The Architect’s in the second movie. The Architect said “the first version was perfect in every way” or something, with no accounting for the possibility that it was flawed in some way they didn’t understand. Given that The Architect was sitting in a TV filled room, waiting for Neo for who knows how long it was probably a blank white room for every person or something…
Conscious thought and perception occupy a pretty small amount of our brain power. If you could offload computational tasks to portions of the brain that wouldn’t actually need to do anything if you were in the matrix, you could have a surplus.
The visual processing portion of our brains, for example. We have a blind spot over our optic nerve and we’re colourblind at our periphery. Our eye hardware actually kinda sucks and we have this massive software layer running on dedicated brain hardware
Are you telling me that my brain isn’t on Wayland
Maybe it’s on Wallace
I don’t think there is a satisfying explanation in the movie, it wasn’t really the point of the film to give one either.
But i think there is one that’s would have been a good fit.
The world getting empty of resources and our planet’s condition worsening, we could have made the simulation for ourselves.
Our brain could be fueled by a renewable enough energy and creating all the comfort of modern society inside of the simulation.
That would have been a better plot for the following films too, trying to understand what was Asimov type of rules we put into the AI and how to hack it.
Honestly, I hope the franchise gets picked up for a remake in 20 years, maybe they can do a better job, bringing in all these sorts of ideas, especially if there’s a strong fanfiction base (I’m sure there is).
Lol, you been paying attention to the climate? Ain’t gonna be no movies in 20 years
Maybe the robots will make one.
You know how scientists announced they got slime molds to solve mazes? I imagine it could be something like that. The slime mold is just looking for food and living its life. What it doesn’t realize is that the food has been put somewhere that will force it to solve certain computational problems along the way.
Now imagine a central scheduler breaking down computational problems into bite-sized chunks and using an immersive storytelling simulator to force a few billion humans to do something similar. I could see it, in theory.
Yep, humans weren’t supposed to be batteries which would be wasteful, and they might as well use cattle. They were supposed to use human brainpower as CPU for the machines.
humans are an entropic species
You make it sound like there is an alternative
Yeah let’s get atrophic, baby
tldr: read the invisibles
For anyone wondering this is a series of 7 comic books, which I have not yet read but am now interested in after your commwnt.
gronk
I want to make a Wazowski / Wachowski joke but I’m not sure if that implies “Mike” is a deadname.
don’t let this man distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
And why would the machines need humans to harness energy anyway? Aren’t there an almost infinite number of species on this earth that could serve the same purpose without the risk of them waking up and overthrow you? I imagine pigs don’t care much about anything and you could pretty much scrap the whole Matrix thing.
I love this types of joke where an entire story is told just as setup for a single joke (or pun)
deleted by creator
And now on YouTube the Red Pill symbolizes accepting misogyny as the backbone for society.
Conservatives can truly spin everything for the worst.
Pretty sure it means accepting that you’re trans
And the blue pill symbolizes continuing to pretend to be someone else
Like the whole movie is a trans allegory, especially considering the creators.
I can certainly see that in regards to the movie. I think I read somewhere too that the character “Switch” would switch genders from the real world into the Matrix. I think it would have been real cool if it had made it to the movie.
I feel so bad for Laurence Fishburne. This pic does him dirty. It’s got him looking like the cenobite Butterball
That’s what not being a human battery does to you
!This propaganda was bought to you by the machines!<
Kudos to whoever found the one frame out of a hundred thousand where Fishburne isn’t looking like a total badass.
This just made me realise the matrix is also an allegory of capitalism
…as well as for whether you’d choose to know harsh realities over comforting dreams. Capitalism has a few choices and perspectives in this regard.
and also an allegory for transitioning
edit: there’s a reason why the wachowski brothers are no longer brothers
Wow, I really did not know about that. From your comment I assumed one transitioned, but they both did!
Yep, the matrix is capitalism (a system of control) and getting unplugged is class consciousness.
I thought matrix was going to school and getting unplugged was graduating.
STEAKS ARE FAKE
REAL STEAK DOESN’T EXIST
LEARN KUNG FUUUUUUUUU
They aren’t fake, they’re just rare
I mean it’s a funny meme, but philosophers have been debating about which of these is the better option for millenia. It isn’t like the general consensus is that living in that living in the Matrix was preferable
They also specifically addressed this in the first movie with that guy that turned on them and unplugged people.
Edit: “that guy” being Cypher, just checked the name
Steak man
that living in that living in the Matrix
Deja vu
Haha typo. I meant to say it isn’t the general consensus that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that living in that livi
For me, I don’t take issue with living in the matrix or even being forced to.
It’s that the computers could have made it a utopia where everyone has everything they need or want and just live life or hell even giving interfaces so that people could just build whatever out of thin air
But the computers just… replicated the real world 90’s…and all the suffering and pain and capitalism along with it…
I think the old guy in the second movie said that they did make it a utopia but humans couldn’t deal with living in a perfect wonderland. They fixed it by making it kinda a boring day to day life.
They did try that
Matrix actually makes more sense if the machines use the brains as processors
I heard somewhere that this was the original plan. They changed it because computers were new and they didn’t think people would understand “using human brains as CPUs”
This is direct from the Wachowskis and 100% true. The studio made them dumb down a ton if computer stuff.
That’s a common misconception that’s been passed around the Internet so long that it’s become common knowledge. There’s a great (now deleted, but archived) writeup showing that the Wachowskis always intended humans to be batteries. The actual source of the “processors” idea came from a Neil Gaiman short story written to promote the movie at its release
what is it in the matrix
A power source. It does not make sense.
For the majority of the people it’s enough to trigger their suspension of belief.
Cypher was right. Ignorance is bliss.
He didn’t have to kill three people though.
And knowledge is power.
I don’t know why but him saying Neo’s name a second time has me dyin
It reminds me of Charlie the Unicorn which has a similar cadence
My guess is that it’s because it’s completely unnecessary and thus instantly makes the whole text 50% more unhinged
I thought he didn’t really have a social life.
He had enough of one to go clubbing with the mescaline guy. Let’s be honest: a truly anti-social geek would never even get the invite.
He maybe a loner but he isn’t autistic so people still treat him like a fellow human being.
Porridge is delicious.
Yeah I never understood that part. I’d have deep throated that blue pill so fast.
Yea, should probably look into a mirror and practice it a few times before I try it again
10/10
I like it when he puts on his little hat to keep his head warm.