[appleflaxen]

In the Matrix humanity is enslaved to use them as an energy source.

But the 2nd law of thermodynamics requires that any energy harvested would be, by definition, less than the energy of the food required to sustain their bodies.

Therefore the plot makes no sense, because they should just shovel the food directly into the computer and skip the humans.

[dsr_]

The Doylist explanation is that of course the human brains are being used as computing substrates; the energy explanation is a symptom of how little the Zion people actually know about the world.

[pavel_lishin]

An alternative explanation is that the machines aren't using the humans for anything; they're just devoted to the most ethical treatment of these billions of people who believe themselves to be at war, and the only way to capture them and keep them sane is to hook them up to virtual reality and keep them complacent.

Every human is a prisoner of war, in the finest possible cell.

[brightlancer]

Neo and almost everyone else was born in the Matrix; they weren't captured in war.

[pavel_lishin]

Sure. Because to prevent their prisoners of war from reproducing would be genocide.

They're effectively in a giant prison; within the prison, they're free to do whatever they want. They just can't leave.

[Cthulhu_]

They had to add the battery (or, any reason to actually keep them alive) because extermination would otherwise be the obvious choice.

[pavel_lishin]

It's only an obvious choice if you're a psychopath or a sociopath.

The machines are definitively - and canonically! - not.

[fragmede]

that's one opinion of a world driven by machine. But where machines are currently unable to feel compassion or show mercy, an energy optimization algorithm could easily be seen as sociopathic as it separates mother from child for efficiency reasons because an algorithm said it wound be a more optimal arrangement.

[pavel_lishin]

We're still talking about The Matrix, right?

[dilyevsky]

Afaik that was in the original script but was removed because it was considered too complicated for general audience to understand.

[dragonwriter]

Specifically, IIRC, it was in test cuts of the film, and identified as baffling by test audiences.

I don't think anything substantive in the films is inconsistent with it (and the behavior of the agents throughout the films is suggestive of it), just the in-character exposition.

Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.

[dilyevsky]

Yeah it's a shame because it was such a cool Philip K Dick-esque kind of plot point.

> Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.

Yeah and the original was already meta being a postmodern critique of society so it's a "yo dawg I heard you like meta..."

[Izkata]

The live action films I don't think so, but a few of the shorts in the Animatrix were supposed to be an accurate history archive from the creation of the first machines all the way through the war and the creation of the Matrix. The shorts both included it and kind-of came up with an explanation:

During and before the war, the machines were mostly solar-powered, so blocking out the sky was a last-ditch effort by humans to stop the machines that almost worked. But the machines developed a new form of fusion that used human bio-electricity as some sort of activation or catalyst. They weren't being used as energy directly.

[Cthulhu_]

Which is weird because a spiritual predecessor (and another Keanu Reeves film), Johnny Mnemonic, uses a similar plot point where the brain is used as a data transfer medium.

[dragonwriter]

Johnny Mnemonic was also successful with a much narrower audience than the Matrix, though.

(And brain as thumb drive and braismns as networked processing units are maybe not equivalently difficult concepts for audiences.)

[pavel_lishin]

Neil Gaiman wrote a short story set in the Matrix universe that sticks to this premise: https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Goliath

[eternityforest]

It's kind of immediately obvious if you know tech, to the point where I mostly forgot this wasn't the official canon.

Like, what else about a person is of any use to machines with that kind of power?

[dmurray]

We use cows for the same purpose - we eat them instead of shoveling grass straight into our mouths, even though in some strict sense the grass contains more caloric energy.

Or, we eat vegetables even though the energy in them is less than all the solar energy that falls on them.

But of course the calories in grass and sunlight aren't accessible to us. It's not impossible to imagine some parallel situation where human biology - perhaps genetically modified - is useful to transform some source of energy into a more usable form.

[nottorp]

For meat you could argue that the energy density is much higher than in veggies, so the cows do the job of concentrating it for you.

[WalterBright]

Carnivores are essentially thieves - stealing the energy concentrated by plants instead of doing the work ourselves.

[hinkley]

Herbivores just hate plants.

[hinkley]

Synthetic organisms would have a very different opinion of consumption than we do. Sustenance is much more than calories for us. Not so much for them.

[dmurray]

Use your imagination. Maybe some biological process in genetically engineered humans can sort uranium isotopes more efficiently than a centrifuge. That would make them a net producer of "energy" by a reasonable definition.

[peter422]

Modern industrial farming "wastes" tons of energy to get their desired outputs.

It's possible that the machines were advanced at some things but something that human bodies produced was something they couldn't directly synthesize.

[SilasX]

Right but that still means they need to pick literally any other human output besides “energy”. At the very least it would have to be some very specific form of energy that humans emit.

Just like it would make no sense to explain the purpose of animal agriculture in human society as “extracting the animals’ energy”. Like you said, it’s the different form of energy (plus nutrients) that they can provide, not energy simpliciter.

[Strilanc]

> NEO: Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

> MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

> (Pause.)

> NEO: ...in the Matrix.

> MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

Paraphrased from https://hpmor.com/chapter/64

[karmakaze]

The same thing annoyed me too but not that much--the premise is a bit like a macguffin where the 'why' isn't important.

Pretty much anything to do with physics, especially in sci-fi/space stories. Now I see everything as a typical human emotional drama with a science/space backdrop. Actual sci-fi where the plot directly ties into it is rare, and good ones rarer. It was actually better when sci-fi was niche and what there was, was trying to be good.

Even worse for me these days than this plumbers effect is bad acting. Once my mind gets into the reality of actors doing a job, getting this filmed, and played for me, it's hard to get back into the storyline even if it might be great, like trying to return to a dream when fully woken.

[ballenf]

I always interpreted "battery" to be lazy shorthand for using the humans as data storage or computation. Like an external hard drive or compute cluster. But I knew I was amending the story so I could stay invested in it.

[thriftwy]

This one is super easy. We're getting this story from a band of lunatics. Of course their understanding of the situation is limited by the framework they exist in.

[xigoi]

The Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” is the same. And in fact, it directly shows humans being used to generate electricity, so it can't be explained away.

[wCxV8HzziQBb]

that's just because they're mining for what computers need to function: RLHF data.