[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?