Why do the machines need humans?
Wired’s Matt Blum asks geeky questions about popular sci-fi movies, including one that’s always bugged me:
8. The Matrix: Why do the machines need humans?
The intelligent machines have all humans hooked up to elaborate devices to harvest their body heat and chemicals, right? But they also have sophisticated fusion reactors. The energy production of fusion reactors compared to that of humans (with all the maintenance required, including The Matrix itself) is so much more efficient it’s just ridiculous -— and we’re supposed to believe that intelligent machines, which would presumably operate logically, would keep the humans around anyway? It’s obviously necessary for the plot, but it just makes no sense.
But what would make sense is if humans were used not as batteries, but rather as organic CPUs.
For all its processing power, perhaps the Matrix can’t do something that human brains can. So they use the connected humans as a fleshy cloud computer to keep the Matrix running.
As a viewer, I’d be willing to accept an incredibly simple answer here. On page 50, instead of…
MORPHEUS
The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,00 B.T.U.’s of body heat.
…how about…
MORPHEUS
The human brain is slow and imperfect, but it can do things silicon can’t. It can imagine, create. It can stitch together ideas to form something new. That’s why they need us -- so they can evolve.
Articles
October 6th, 2009 at 10:44 am
But John!
What would they do with the “coppertop” meme?
October 6th, 2009 at 10:53 am
I like the idea but it doesn’t have the same visual impact as comparing the human body to a battery.
October 6th, 2009 at 10:53 am
john, the question i always had was why humans? cows are probably five times larger than a human and The Matrix would be an endless vast green field.
the problem is cows in leather dusters don’t look nearly as cool in slow motion bending backwards dodging bullets.
October 6th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Another one that bugs me: Stargate. They had every symbol in the combination except the LAST one, they claimed. There were only 20 or so symbols total, so why not just put in the whole sequence and try out every symbol until they found one that worked? It would have taken an hour, tops.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:16 am
It’s stated explicitly that they tried it with cows (farm animals?) But they couldn’t live in the Matrix. And they tried it with a heavenly perfect world for the humans too. For some reason within the plot logic, the humans need conflict and stress to stay alive and generate the power. I’ll never forget sitting in a movie theater in Japan, surrounded by quiet, attentive Japanese high schoolers. They watch foreign movies like it’s a homework assignment. No one said a thing when I gasped out loud, “Whaaat?!!!”, at the inanity of the “combined with a special form of cold fusion” line. Maybe if John’s alternate reason were an underlying secret and the power reasoning was just a myth the machines let people think? There’s some of that symbiotic relationship stuff in the murky, kitchen sink plotlines of the sequels, but those were just so slapdash I felt a little tainted. The original Matrix, plot holes and all, is just a great, fun, hero’s journey action pic with a little philosophy thrown in; I still cannot resist watching just a little, even in chopped up cable reruns with a million commercials.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Not only is that much more solid logically, it is also way more thematic. The battery analogy may have been striking but they never went anywhere with it. What makes us human and what makes us different from machines was the entire point.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Wow, I wish they’d gone with your explanation, John. Theirs was a conceptual chink in the armor that has always bugged the hell out of me.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:28 am
The battery thing is a little silly, especially if you take thermodynamics into account. But I’m willing to accept that as the one conceit that’s allowed to make the movie work.
I’m not sure your explanation would bother me any less in the movie, but I don’t like the idea of the machines thinking that humans are intellectually superior in even one way. I like it better when they think of us as cattle.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:34 am
I always figured it was because the Machines were pissed at the humans for trying to kill them, so they enslaved them and given that a machine doesn’t need food or clothing (farming or cotton picking, you get the picture), a machine’s idea of slavery would be to use humans for energy. They wanted us to “pay what we owed them”, so to speak.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Thought I’d bring this to your attention:
http://woodyallensmatrix.tumblr.com/
October 6th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I’m not sure most Americans, who couldn’t wait for the bell to ring in science class, have any idea how fusion reactors actually work, forget about any idea how artificial intelligence functions. Sure, the guys at Wired picked at the movie and came up with this, but these guys do science EVERY SINGLE DAY. Most people only do science for an hour a day for a brief period of ten years of their life. They know what a battery is, though. It’s tangible and they’re familiar with the technical terms. While the AI angle would have been more scientifically valid, there’s no way they could have thrown out the technical terms that CS experts use to explain the difference between cognition and boolean logic and all the other issues without the audience thinking “Hey, they just made up a bunch of fancy stuff that sounds like computer engineering to impress us. This is BS.” But a good number of us understand volts and BTUs. We’ve heard it enough that we know it’s real. AI is basically magic to most people. (I remember an article in Wired, natch, about how our misunderstanding of statistics leads many completely rationally iPod users to believe that their iPod is actually reading their minds, not randomly picking the next song.)
October 6th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Not to mention you would have no reason to invent the jarringly dumb “man blackened the sky” explanation for the nuclear winter. It’s just completely implausible that any group of humans, no matter how war-crazed or terrified, could ever think that the sun is more important to the planet’s mechanical inhabitants than it is to its biological inhabitants.
With the computing explanation, you could just have a plain nuclear winter. All the great visuals with none of the cognitive dissonance.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:43 am
I actually heard that the initial concept for The Matrix did indeed conceive humans used for processing power as part of a giant “matrix” of human cpus, but also heard that the powers that be felt this would be difficult for audiences to understand. Thus, the silly battery thing.
I don’t remember where I heard this rumor, so consider it compelling but completely unsubstantiated.
Still, I can’t imagine that filmmakers who would be smart enough to show Trinity entering actual terminal commands for an actual Unix exploit rather than just saying “Hey it’s Unix, I know this” followed by some visually silly 3D flight-simulator-based UI (yeah, I know that UI exists, but that doesn’t mean its use made sense in Jurassic Park); I can’t believe such filmmakers wouldn’t also be smart enough to know that humans would be better used for computation than to generate electricity.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:44 am
I agree, processing is a much more interesting and plausible explanation.
I think there may be an argument for revenge or entertainment. The machines don’t need us, but either enjoy torturing humans or watching them play out their lives. And, they decided that they might as well get some benefit from keeping them in stasis. It’s just another idea, if you’re wanting another option to the battery scenario.
To play devil’s advocate, in reality, most things don’t drift to their most logical conclusion. Our substance on fossil fuels could have gone a different way if the popularity had worked out differently, but now it’s just easier to have a car run on gas. Also, if a couple nuclear meltdowns hadn’t occurred, we very well could be getting most of our electricity from them. Who’s to say the machines don’t like a byproduct of the fusion reactors and, even though they’re less efficient, they prefer humans.
Anyway, good post, really enjoy your blog. Thanks for the fun topic.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:44 am
From what I’d heard (of course, ‘heard’ — in no way can I back this up) the Wachowski’s were all about it being about the machines using our brains but the studios ’said’ it would go over the audience’s head and had them dumb it down to ‘body energy’ and ‘batteries’.
I don’t know how legit that is, but I remember that going around a lot when the original flick came out.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:46 am
The battery thing is the biggest problem of the Matrix’ premise, and it was so obvious even I refused to accept it until I figured it out for myself.
Basic problem is that the humans need to get their energy from somewhere in order to live and create heat, so by putting the energy THROUGH humans, who waste energy on other things like breathing and thinking, the machines are WASTING energy that could last them a little longer by using their leftover spare energy for themselves.
But John, your alternative isn’t much better. The assumption in the movie that the machines had achieved sentience should imply that they’ve got a big enough consciousness to learn how to evolve themselves, and supposedly at far more efficient rates than humans do, especially since clearly having the humans around cause far more messes than they clean up.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I’ve always had a problem with this Matrix-Logic myself. Your simple line-fix that actually makes sense. HOWEVER — it takes away the idea that the humans are underdogs. Despite everything, humans are superior. Also begs for a hybrid/cyborg showdown.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I told myself the machines were just that pissed and vengeful. They wanted us as blind slaves, and got some sinister kick out of using us for batteries. It’s not great, but it jived for me.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:53 am
You could fanwank it by saying that the machines didn’t actually need humans, but mostly wanted to find a reason to enslave them as a way of asserting their dominance — it’s more satisfying than just wiping them out.
Yes, machines by their nature aren’t supposed to “want” anything, but the movie showed pretty clearly that the machines had evolved some very human emotions and desires.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:56 am
I always thought the battery idea was terrible. It was the one thing that kept this movie from being great.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
By the way, the simplest explanation I can come up with why the energy equation in the Matrix is false:
It’s like using a rechargeable battery to charge the other one, and then vice versa. Energy would constantly trickle out into nothingness due to imperfect efficiency, plus you wouldn’t have enough energy to power the machine that switches the batteries around, much less power yourself (if you were the machine).
Now imagine if those batteries also used up energy themselves because they moved and had blinking lights (analogs for humans twitching and thinking).
The process would last a day until it ran out of juice but if you’d just put the damn battery into your back and through out everything else you’da probably lasted an extra day on top of that.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
In early drafts, the explanation was similar to that. The producers/studio feared that the audience would reject that explanation on the grounds “computers are smarter than people.”
Or take Arvin’s objection: “The assumption in the movie that the machines had achieved sentience should imply that they’ve got a big enough consciousness to learn how to evolve themselves, and supposedly at far more efficient rates than humans do, especially since clearly having the humans around cause far more messes than they clean up.”
Various machines in the sequels (Agent Smith, the Architect, the Merovingian) contradict Arvin’s view, but we wouldn’t know that in the original.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Nice work, Mr August.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
To follow further on Nick’s idea above, one of the back-history shorts in the Animatrix collection delved into the political and social story behind the machines. Having seen that, it starts to become plausible that the harvesting of humans was possibly a form of exacting revenge, not necessarily the most logical choice.
And also, it’s worth remembering some of the central arguments behind the whole evolution of the Matrix universe are that these are possibly cyclical chains of events that have happened more than once to humanity. And there are buggers in the system designed to bugger things up in order to keep everything flowing. And that the system isn’t perfect because of the existence of free will.
So it follows that the imperfect things within the system would make imperfect decisions based on free will. And those imperfections allow the whole thing to play out and lead to some sort of never-coming judgment.
I think the value of The Matrix movies, and one that they unfortunately strayed from as the series progressed, is the underlying spiritual exploration behind it all. It’s specific enough to be approachable, and vague enough to allow things to be explainable within its universe without it necessarily being a flaw.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Addressing the Stargate bit first, the reason they could not dial all those different combinations is that dialing any one of them takes time and energy. Dialing all possible sequences would take not hours but weeks. Also, in the movie, they did not have any idea of the functional limitations of the dialing process and could not take the chance on blowing what might have been the one shot at getting home. The city had no power sources of any kind, no tech sector, nothing to back them up if it didn’t work. From a military tactics POV, that’s not the way to do things and it was a military expedition. So that was entirely consistent.
With regard to the Matrix, what is being missed is that the machines clearly had not only sentience and self-awareness, they had emotion just as the humans did. They showed a psyche as deep and complex as humans and as we all know humans are never as simple in their makeup as a logline.
I assumed the machines did it as a bit of revenge on the humans who created them to be slaves. Now the humans would be their slaves. I have little doubt the machines would have made the Matrix a living hell to visit pain on the humans if only that was workable. Unfortunately the human mind doesn’t cooperate so to keep the system functioning, they had to settle for a simulation of the world as it had once been and be satisfied with knowing the truth.
Also, we know in reality that fusion can be done, but we don’t know how to do it feasibly on a large scale. It also requires energy to fabricate the materials and then parts to make more power stations. With the world in a mangled shambles, extraction of materials and refinement and so on was likely energy cost prohibitive compared to basic survival of the machines.
Finally, the destruction of the world is entirely in keeping with human nature. For thousands of years, and the current global warming/climate change silliness notwithstanding, humans have treated the world as if it exists solely for their benefit and assumed themselves the center of all things. If we imagine a not only powerful robot force looking to eradicate man, but also an emotional seriously angry machine force, to humans the ferocity might have seemed total end of the world. In that case, who cares? Win at any costs. Salt the fields, poison the wells, let your enemy have nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory. That’s very human behavior.
After all, they do that at the end of things, not the beginning. After billions are already dead and over half the cities of man reduced to rubble, you’re not going to be thinking about the future, just about right now.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
One other thing that doesn’t make sense. They say that mankind scorched the sky, but at the end of Revolutions, Trinity pilots her ship high enough to break through the cloud cover and see the sun. I would assume if her ship could make it that high, it wouldn’t be too difficult for the machines to do so and harness that unlimited solar power.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Great idea, john. And it ties directly into the main premise, mind over matter. Neo can change the matrix because the maxtrix is run on human brain power/ imagination. I love it!
October 6th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Great idea, John. And it ties directly into the main premise, mind over matter. Neo can change the matrix because the matrix is run on human brain power/ imagination. I love it!
October 6th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
John, can’t you get them to change that one line for the next Blu-Ray Special Edition?
Just think of the fun your agent could have making the deal.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
How’s this… They keep humans in pods in a continuous effort to find their soul, the one concept machines do not understand.
There could’ve been these abandoned fields of grotesque lab pods where humans where dissected in search of their soul, etc.
Pretty darn cool shit.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
That energy thing always bothered me too, as it basically makes no sense at all from an energy perspective. I just had to try to ignore it and pretend that there must be another reason. I like your explanation John, or some variation of it, wherin for whatever reason the machines need our minds living in this simulation for some grander purpose. This is something I always just pretended was the explanation anyway (I never really sat down and really tried to create a coherent fully realized reason, just assumed it was something like that, and tried to enjoy the action and other aspects of the movie).
October 6th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
John, you should try to get on for a sequel to The Matrix.
I really quite enjoyed the first one, and wish they would make another movie, or two, with the same energy and inventiveness (even if it’s borrowed inventiveness).
October 6th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
I prefer the humans as energy source in the Matrix for two reasons. First, the concept that humans can imagine and machines can’t is pretty old. It’s not that you can’t explore that, but it’s not that original for an initiating idea. Second, it’s been shown that animals are very efficient at using cheap chemicals to efficiently produce energy. I’m guessing the computers stumbled onto this and used it because even advanced beings probably grab onto the first solution that works. If they’re computers or computer-like, that’s even more likely. If it’s anything like other technology, the computers probably stumbled onto this solution and created so much infrastructure that they couldn’t afford to change.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Reinforcing what others have said, the original concept WAS as suggested here.
Whether it was changed willingly for the sake of the shock value (forgive the pun) or at the request of the studio, I’m not sure. I do remember hearing that from several sources, though.
October 6th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Scientist Luis von Ahn comes to a very similar conclusion here at 38:20. He gives a lot of reasons that human computation exceeds — and may always exceed — that of machines.
October 6th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
The Matrix is ancient history. As a sci-fi fan I am of the humble opinion that the people at Battlestar Galactica (the new TV series mind you, not the old one) have been pushing the envelope the furthest in terms of exploring human – machine interaction.
October 6th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Morpheus’ dialog is also poorly thought out with regards to the battery. It’s obvious that the writer wasn’t too technical either.
A battery by definition is DC voltage and there are few that output 120V.Most batteries are 3-20 DC volts tops. The power in your house is 120V but that’s AC.
It looked good on paper, though.
October 6th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
John, you’re cutting out the next part, which is important.
Morpheus: “Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.”
Just because they didn’t explain how that fusion would occur doesn’t mean it’s not the organic CPU scenario, which acts as a type of battery.
There’s an essay by technologist and philosopher Peter B. LLoyd, in “Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in the Matrix.”
In it he says:
“Controlled fusion is a subtle and complex process, requiring constant monitoring and micromanaging. The human brain, on the other hand, is a superb parallel computer. Most likely, the machines are harnessing the spare brainpower of the human race as a colossal distributed processor for controlling the nuclear fusion reactions.”
Your alternative version is creative, but it does conflict with other creative elements in the trilogy as a whole.
For instance, it is the Architect who created the Matrix, and he looks down on human traits, including creativity and innovation. It is the intuitive program, the Oracle, who’s more interested in human creativity and innovation. So there is a range of programs within the Matrix, in terms of their degree for “needing” human creativity.
The Architect could really care less if the humans exist, he’s not interested in evolution in the human sense, but rather mathematical precision. He was created by the Machines to create the Matrix, but that doesn’t mean he enjoys his work, rather, he’s pretty cynical about the whole thing. It’s the Oracle that’s invested in the future, co-evolution between the two species.
And if you step outside of the Matrix, to the big boss Deus ex Machina — there’s no clear evidence that he cares about co-evolution either. In Revolutions, it’s Neo that has to convince Dues ex to jack him in — to destroy Smith — not so machines can evolve with humans, but so that Smith doesn’t destroy everything (the Matrix and the Real World).
“The human brain is slow and imperfect, but it can do things silicon can’t. It can imagine, create. It can stitch together ideas to form something new.”
This is true for right now. But there’s a whole transhumanist movement of scientists/researchers working with a purpose, so that silicon-based brains (or at least augmented carbon-based brains) can match and even outperform carbon-based ones. Someday a machine mind will have an imagination.
“That’s why they need us — so they can evolve.”
At some point, I don’t think they really need us to evolve, they just need what makes us human, which is mainly emotion. When AI have emotional intelligence, they’re going to evolve just fine, whether or not we are there to co-exist with them. Of course, it’d be better for both races if they could co-exist. Since part of the evolution process is growing up while also understanding your parents.
BCLaraby said:
“From what I’d heard (of course, ‘heard’ — in no way can I back this up) the Wachowski’s were all about it being about the machines using our brains but the studios ’said’ it would go over the audience’s head and had them dumb it down to ‘body energy’ and ‘batteries’.
I don’t know how legit that is, but I remember that going around a lot when the original flick came out.”
I didn’t hear that, but it makes sense. Given that the brothers knew the Architect’s speech in Reloaded wouldn’t be well received (read: initially understood).
They needed the first movie to do well, because they needed a much bigger much to make the sequels. So they might have opted for simpler if they had to. But, as Archie’s famous apropos-ness demonstrates, the Wachowski’s don’t go for simple, junk-food action flick. They’ve said repeatedly that they wanted to make an action movie that made people think.
Thanks for sparking the discussion, John. I think some great points were brought up about the sense of revenge the machines externalized by enslaving the human race. Some scenes from the Animatrix, “The Second Renaissance” really show this.
October 6th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Questioning this kind of thing is missing the whole point of the film, which sure isn’t a great film anyway. That’s just some background shit. Who cares why they’ve enslaved mankind? They did, and humans have to fight for their freedom. Get over it.
October 6th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Dark Knight is on that list, but I think the question should be: Why would you put live grenades in the hands of a roomful of frightened bank hostages?
October 6th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
They could have just used Mechanical Turk…I’m sure some of those peeps living in the underworld would have wanted to make some extra cash, no?
October 6th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
I THINK THAT THE EFFICIENCY QUANDARY IS INTERESTING BUT MISSES THE POINT. THE MACHINES NEED THE PEOPLE PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY ARE HUMANS AND NOT COWS. THE CHARACTERS HAVE ART,MUSIC,LOVE AND THE MACHINES CAN MIMIC BUT ARE NOT CAPABLE OF THESE THINGS. THE FASCINATING PART IS THEY KNOW IT EXISTS.
October 6th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Your answer is much more satisfying and interesting BUT I think the Matrix writers have a more nihilistic vision of humanity. By their rendering human beings into nothing more than clumps of bio-matter, they equate our value to nothing more than our chemicals. As you eloquently say, we are so much more.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Using people as CPUs has already been explored in novels. In the excellent Hyperion Cantos SPOILERS AHEAD the plot revolves around the revelation that the Technocore (AIs who have become autonomous from humanity but coexist) created the Farcasters (teleporters basically) so that they can tap into the potential computing power of hundreds of billions of people during the milliseconds between teleportation. And later in the series they create a sort of resurrection so that they can kill people to tap into the burst of creativity before death. END SPOILERS.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Who cares?
October 6th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
I always thought that the plot was weak in that explanation, so I always try to write “perfectly cut” schemes. In the end, you must allow a flaw in order to give your heroes a hope/chance?
I personally was more confused about the “special dessert” that the girl eats in the sequel… am I the only one who believes that the dessert caused other thing instead of an orgasm?
I was also talking with a friend about the ‘HAL-9000′… maybe it’s the most annoying sci-fi film ever.
Don’t you think?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
I think the point for me was that unless you’re an engineer or a screenwriter, two groups who constantly dissect everything they see. (Groups I’m tangentially a part of) This problem, or at least these questions, never came up while viewing. The Matrix to me was so new and different, that any inconsistencies disappeared because I was so into what was going on, emotionally invested in what happened next.
October 7th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Humans are NOT batteries and they are NOT power stations.
Energy cannot be created, it can only be transformed. The energy you get from coal, oil, uranium etc. is already stored inside. Power stations work because you get more energy out of the fuel than it takes to extract it, so there is a net-worth. Humans consume more energy than they set free. Batteries only store energy. You need more energy to fill a battery than you get out of it. Entropy always increases.
“Some kind of fusion” is a non-explanation and an obvious logic band-aid.
The machines ALREADY use human brains as part of the Matrix simulation, as they are engaged in a feedback-loop with the virtual construct. So, this explanation makes much more sense.
But, John, can you explain why they need to run a virtual reality at all? Why waste so much processing power? Hardly so that the humans will stay alive – coma patients can survive in principle indefinitely without stimulus.
October 7th, 2009 at 2:17 am
The Human CPU thing has been done previously by Joe Straczynski in Babylon 5, with the Shadows using kidnapped humans ans CPUs for their vessels. But, to the other posters who have, questioning logic of writing in the Matrix sequels seems daft.
October 7th, 2009 at 2:35 am
In fairness, dissecting the Matrix trilogy and suggesting ways to make it better would take so long that we’d have to build machines to continue the work after we’ve all gone.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Beneath all the action and “physical” conflict, the movie really raises questions about the nature of consciousness and the worlds created by it. Within the Matrix, human consciousness is still a free agent, hence able to move past the confinements of illusion by choosing to follow a process of initiation. All the technical details aside, I feel that John’s solution serves this basic theme of the movie much better – without adding unnecessary weight to the dramatic premise. I really liked the film and never really had a problem with the human battery motive, but then again that’s the one part about it I never remember… Either way, it’s definitely a great subject for discussion and always fun to read so many different takes on it.
October 7th, 2009 at 9:00 am
The Best excuse for this I have ever found is in the Harlan Ellison story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” Where the malevelant super computer keeps some remnant of humanity alive simply because it hates us for creating it.
October 7th, 2009 at 9:17 am
DAV, THE SPECIAL DESSERT REPRESENTS LIFE. IN FRENCH, WE SAY “LECHER LES FENETRES”. IT MEANS LOOKING IN AND DESIRING. YOU ARE LICKING THE WINDOW BUT YOU CAN’T GET IN. THE MACHINES KEEP HUMANS AROUND BECAUSE IT IS LOGICAL TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF MAN.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Yup, I used the “Evil AI Computers need humans as CPUs” in a screenplay.
As for “Dark Knight”, here’s a bigger one: why didn’t they all just swim off the ferries?
October 7th, 2009 at 11:55 am
John,
This reminds me of a debate that often divides a friend and myself. He tends to object to ’scientifically implausible’ ideas in movies, like the one you point out. I, on the other hand, object to ‘psychologically implausible’ ideas. As it happens, I was watching “Cold Mountain” this last weekend and thought the entire premise of both Jude Law and Nicole Kidman ‘falling in love’ so that each longed and pined for each other through the Civil War was pretty implausible.
I do think your ‘cloud computer’ idea is a superior solution to the ‘battery’ from a technical standpoint, but at the time the Matrix was written, a general audience could probably relate more to a ‘battery’ than a ‘cloud computer’, perhaps?
October 7th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Hence,
Bill Joy’s famous WIRED essay:
Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
October 7th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I don’t mean to troll in, but I think the whole “computers can’t imagine” idea is pretty lame and clichéd. It could only be worse if you said “computers can’t dream or make art or fall in love”. If we asume computers and AI’s can get angry, be jelous, lustful, greedy, self-sacrificing… as they are all along the trilogy, then we can safely assume they can do and feel pretty much anything the human brain can. Hell, they even show empathy! It doesn’t matter if those are realistic expectations for the future of AI’s or not. It is not a documentary, it is a movie, and it only needs to respect its internal coherence.
What this issue you are discussing here makes evident is that the films fails on another level: that of keeping the viewer engaged with the story. The moment you start considering whether a side note is plausible or not, it means the scene didn’t have enought dramatic interest. I personally find that the Matrix movies explain way too much about their setting. It is too geekish. As viewers, we don’t need all the answers, just enough to understand the story and its implications.
The Matrix is one of the most overrated movies I can think off, anyway.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
All I know is Mary Stack needs to Chillax with the caps.
It rhymes!
October 7th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
ADAM, WHEN YOU ARE 49 YOU WILL USE CAPS TOO. YOU SOUND LIKE MY 21 YEAR DAUGHTER. GET BACK TO CLASS!!!
October 7th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Mary Stack, contrary to what the Internet may have told you, caps lock is NOT cruise control for cool. Capitalize exclamatory statements, first letter of proper nouns, and the beginning letter of a sentence only.
October 7th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Ummmm – No. I know plenty of 49 year olds who know how to type properly. And you’re only 13 years older than me, don’t qualify for the AARP discount or the seniors rate at the theater. You aren’t too old to learn to unseize the caps key!
October 7th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
SERIOUSLY, THE DIVIDE GET BACK ON TOPIC. I AIN’T IT! SORRY ADAM, BUT ANYONE WHO USES THE WORD “CHILLAX”…36…YOU CAN ARGUE WITH ME @ http://twitter.com/MSTACK60 BY THE WAY, ALL MY TWEETS ARE IN CAPS TOO. WHAT IF WE WERE ALL LIVING IN THE MATRIX?
October 8th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Same question came up for me with Soylent Green–why compact the humans into tiny little pills when they would be far more nutritious just cooked or stewed? OK, fine, people could be grossed out, but you could tell them it was lamb, right?
October 8th, 2009 at 2:16 am
Morpheus never said that the machines had fusion. He only said that they had a form of fusion. Look…..
“The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.”
I started to wounder where the human themselves got their energy, and I thought that maybe it was with the energy from the earths core. If that is possible, then why did the machines never try to do that and get rid of the humans? Do they need the intellectual stimulation as we all do?
October 8th, 2009 at 2:52 am
Anyone see that movie “I, Robot”? I prefer to think that the Matrix machines need humans because they started out with some variation on Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” programmed into them that prevented them from killing humans. They then justified the enslavement of mankind to themselves by reasoning that humans were better off that way — better to enslave mankind than let them blow themselves up in a nuclear war or pollute the planet until it’s uninhabitable.
October 8th, 2009 at 3:36 am
As for the initial point,
I d venture that maybe Earth is out of plutonium , oil & other mineral stuff the Machines could indeed produce energy from.
Whereas the black nutriment liquid (hyper carbon) feed in by the pods and made out of previously dead humans + oxygen + nitrogen of the atmosphere makes a cheap and available fuel in order to produce electric power the Machines are craving for.
October 8th, 2009 at 5:58 am
I think it’s weird that suddenly so many people come out and say: “Well, y’know…now that you say it, the battery-thing never really made sense to me.” But while I think it’s unnecessary to “improve” screenplays 11 years after the movies came out (or in general after they came out, especially because the imdb-boards are full of stuff like this [although 99.9% of it is silly fanboy-wank]), one could argue that the fact that the brain contains the human mind has something to do with. I don’t think that the human mind would be happy to work as a computer, so they would need to put it into the Matrix to make it happy and pretend that everything is alright. But since the most important parts of the brains are now occupied by the Matrix-distraction, the brain-computer isn’t working as it should and so they just use them as batteries. That’s my silly fanboy-wank. :)
October 8th, 2009 at 6:22 am
ummm… how about we just recast neo with someone who can act?
October 8th, 2009 at 6:54 am
i think they just need to do away with the matrix and keanu reeves period!
October 8th, 2009 at 7:12 am
I think the battery idea actually works. Granted they have reactors, but aren’t humans a “green” alternative to that? Cheap, renewable, and will ensure that the environment the machines live in will recover from “the sky being scorched” at which point I imagine the machines would switch back to solar power.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:16 am
I haven’t read all of the responses (got about 20 down or so and didn’t see anyone saying what I’m about to).
However, the Animatrix shorts revealed that the ‘enslaving’ of humanity as a sort of battery was more of a detente between the biological and mechanical, an easy way to end the war that was completely destroying the planet both of them needed to survive.
And secondly, the battery explanation is the one that Neo is given by Morpheus. You know, the guy who learned things from other people who had escaped the Matrix. As in, his beliefs are more religious that factual. The people are freed from the Matrix, see a whole ton of other humans hooked up all crazy like, and come up with a story that simplifies and vilifies the villains, and is easy to understand by any of the people they free from the Matrix. Just because a character says something in a movie doesn’t mean that they’re right.
October 8th, 2009 at 8:25 am
The film doesn’t state that they have “cold fusion”, but rather a “special form of cold fusion”. It is entirely possible that this form of cold fusion can only work when combined with a separate power source (human batteries), or that it can only operate when fed with organic compounds derived from the human production of energy.
It’s also possible that the wavelengths of human brain activity, or the wavelengths of the human produced energies are necessary to regulate the special cold fusion process. In other words, the cold fusion energies and human energies may combine in a symbiotic way to produce enough energy to satisfy the machines, while one of these processes alone could not.
October 8th, 2009 at 8:49 am
This is pretty fascinating territory. How more complex the battle with the machines would be were the machines to adore the humans, rather than despise them and viewing them as a necessary evil; they would have enslaved them out of some misplaced sense of love, in a way. Rather than rejecting humans for their humanity via the over-played idea of machines being cold and methodical, perhaps, once self-aware, they view that very cold, methodical nature as a flaw within themselves. This could also be a comedy: “Immediately after becoming self-aware, the first thing the machines realized was that they needed a psychiatrist.” A new spin on The Matrix or a sequel to Sleeper?
October 8th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Isn’t there a difference between what is actually happening and what Morpheus/Human resistance “believes” is happening?
The “battery” explanation is given by Morpheus, who doesn’t even actually know what year is it, the fact the he (and most humans) think they’re there to be used as batteries is based on what machines led them to believe, so it may or may not be true.
For me, illogical explanations given by characters that are not stated as “fact” don’t mess with the movie-going experience, I just assume that’s what the character believes happened, no necessarily what “actually” happened within the movie’s world.
October 8th, 2009 at 10:10 am
If they used us as CPUs, which does make more sense than batteries by a wide margin, our brains would be occupied processing and no Matrix would be needed.
October 8th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Actually, I thought that was what the Matrix was using humans for. I guess my brain just edited out the dumb explanation and substituted something more credible :)
October 8th, 2009 at 11:12 am
I 100% agree, that bugged me to no end in the first film!
Think about how many calories are in a human body at any given time, now think about how many calories a human consumes in order to reach physical maturity…its doesn’t make any dang sense, there is absolutely know way for there to be a net gain of energy in feeding humans the dead bodies of other humans, it would exponentially decrease the population in order to work…and then what are the machines going to use for “batteries”
Also, why not use cows or something easier to manage than humans.
October 8th, 2009 at 11:25 am
who cares cool film stop trying to make it real
October 8th, 2009 at 11:55 am
You see, John!? You see what you’ve started here?!?
October 8th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Good point. Humans are a renewable resource, as is the food that they eat. So the machines will want to avoid using up all the Earth’s natural resources, since they are intelligent and have a larger sense of time. That is, the main machine will try to exist forever, and account for its resources accordingly. Us humans will eventually die so could care less about depleting all our energy sources.
October 8th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
If anyone of you have watched Animatrix(the 2nd and the 3rd portions) then you would know that the machines developed human emotions within themselves even bebore the battle that took place where it was decided by the world leaders to scorch the sky to cut off solar energy- the main source of energy for the machines at that time. So I think that- even though it may be totally unnecessary for the machines to use human bodies as batteries, they do it just for the satisfaction of knowing that they have enslaved those whom they once obeyed as masters.
October 8th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Yeah, this was what the explanation was meant to be until studio executives called it too obscure and mandated the current version.
They also felt no one would understand the word “chrysalis” in one part of the film.
October 8th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Interestingly, before The Matrix came out, they asked a bunch of writers and artists to write and draw comics and short stories, based on the script. Neil Gaiman’s, called Goliath, actually refers to the role of the humans for the machines as computers.
October 8th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
That may improve the first film, but it would take away from the next two, all you need to know in the first film is that humans are batteries, but the realisation that they need us to evolve only comes into play at the end of the third, to give that infomation away in the first film would be like giving away the puchline before you’ve told the joke.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
I have to say, I always believed the real reason the machines kept humans was for use as cheap CPUs.
In the films whenever an agent appears, he must first take over a human body…sounds like a CPU to me. There is also a short story on the matrix site called “Goliath” where the machines spend years training a human to fly a sentinel, sounds like he was the CPU of that machine.
As for using humans to generate power. Remember, they are living in a perpetual winter, energy would be hard to come by. Their main source of power could be fusion, but if the human CPUs are giving off heat, why let that go to waste. If you are stranded in the desert with a limited amount of food, you tend to save every last crumb.
October 9th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
With this list, Wired boldly goes where Cracked already went: http://www.cracked.com/article_16625_8-classic-movies-that-got-away-with-gaping-plot-holes.html http://www.cracked.com/article/142_6-brilliant-movie-scientists-who-suck-at-their-job/
Like Matt #71 and EE #74, I dismissed the battery business as disinformation. Instead, I imagine that the Machines are dutifully caring for humanity, maintaining a system of maximum leisure that has degenerated to pointlessness.
October 10th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
At the time, I remember thinking the battery explanation was cack, pure and simple. But I didn’t care – disbelief duly suspended, I enjoyed the rest of the movie.
I do however think that John’s alternative explanation is more engaging and thematically relevant (I’ve been struggling with a ‘human brains as computer processors’ idea of my own for a while), but 30 seconds of thinking about it took me off in a completely different direction to that explored in the matrix.
As for unanswered questions… in the Alien franchise, what exactly do the aliens eat?
October 11th, 2009 at 9:29 am
I’ve always had the same problem with The Matrix, and had thought of the same fix (though I wouldn’t have worded the fixed dialog so well!). I’m having a similar problem with Surrogates. (I don’t think what follows is a spoiler, as it happens in the first ten minutes of the movie, but if you’re very spoiler-sensitive and haven’t read any reviews or seen any ads, don’t read on!)
The only connection with the surrogate seems to be a pair of video goggles. I can even buy that it is sending some “special” signal to make the experience a little more immersive than simple audio/video. But I just can’t buy that the machine could send back an overload that instantly kills the operator. Maybe some kind of epileptic seizure that would kill some people, but not instant eye-bleeding death.
They could have so easily fixed two problems by changing the interface. The other problem I had was why people would choose to have physical surrogates, when some kind of virtual reality would be easier and cheaper to do if the only interface is audio/video (even given some kind of “special” signal). If they showed us some kind of Existenz-style brain or spinal cord plug-in, then I would believe that the operators get the complete sensations of their physical surrogates, and also that a reverse overload could cause instant death.
October 13th, 2009 at 7:24 am
I think every now and then, John gets bored and writes something controversial (in the geek world at least) and then sits back and watches the maelstrom he created…
October 13th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
I think machines in the future will have far superior intellect than humans, even for creative-thinking, so harvesting us for ‘battery’ or computing power both seem a bit ridiculous.
I would’ve liked to see the plot line be something about humans and robots making some kind of agreement, where the machines would either kill us or put us in these pods (if we agreed to it without a big fight).
Or maybe a group of high-up, corrupt, politicians agreed to it for their benefit, like what’s-his-face making the agreement with agent Smith.
Maybe the machines are using the Matrix as a test-bed for what might be possible if humans are brought back to real life. Like an experiment they can drop things into at times.
October 14th, 2009 at 7:17 am
I’ve always been annoyed by the battery explination too.
I had a similar idea myself: Morpheus explains that computers can do many things but they cannot generate truly random numbers. They cannot provide “inputs” for themselves that are truly surprising or unexpected.
And without such inputs … there can be no imagination …. no true “discovery” of ideas. No self-revelation and no true “consciousness.”
Basically, my idea is kinda a more technical back-stop to your same notion. “The machines call it random number generation … I call it needing a soul.”
October 14th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
I think it’s the choice between the emotional (shock value of comparing the human body to a battery) and the cerebral by adding more depth and purpose to the “machine” character if you will. It boils down to what you want to ask of the reader/audience do you want to emote or do you want to think?
October 14th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I think the battery explanation, while it seemed pretty silly at first, works because it is a logical extension of the disdain the machines had towards humans.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Johh, are you trying to tell us that you’ve become a Studio Executive affected by brain cloud with this post?