Alternate take: humans are a simple biological battery that can be harvested using systems already in place that the computers can just use like an API.
This is a cute idea for a movie and all but it’s incredibly impractical/unsustainable. If a system required that it’s energy storage be self-replicating (for whatever reason) then you would design and fabricate that energy storage solution for that system. Not be reliant on a calorically inefficiently produced sub-system (i.e. humans).
You literally need to grow an entire human just to store energy in it. Realistically, you’re looking at overfeeding a population with as much calorically dense, yet minimally energy intensive foodstuffs just to store energy in a material that’s less performant than paraffin wax (body fat has an energy density of about 39 MJ/kg versus paraffin wax at about 42 MJ/kg). That’s not to speak of the inefficiencies of the mixture of the storage medium (human muscle is about 5 times less energy dense than fat).
I read that we are terribly inefficient as a battery. Instead of feeding us, the sentient robots can take the food and burn it and have more power output from the food they would have fed us.
It was supposed to be humans were used as CPUs but they were concerned people wouldn’t understand. (So might at well go for the one that makes no sense? Yeah sure why not.)
Inefficient in what sense, burning trees is inefficient also but a viable and necessary stepping stone.
I’m not implying that the matrix is how it’s be I’m positing that we’re an already “designed” system they could extract a resource from, I doubt we’d be anything more than that is all, battery, processing power, bio sludge that they can gooify and convert to something they need for power generation or biological building, who knows.
Burning trees gave humans warmth in the cold and later, valuable carbon for making hotter fires to work metals.
Why would a computer need living batteries when it could just build a nuclear reactor and have steady energy for practically forever. Nuclear power also doesn’t need huge swaths of maintained farmland to feed it, and complicated sewer systems to dispose of the waste.
Even if an AI wanted to be green for some reason, it would be way more efficient to just have huge fields of solar panels. Remember, biological beings get their energy second or third hand, and practically all energy in the ecosystem comes from the sun. Plants take energy from the sun, and convert a fraction of that into sugars. An animal eats those plants and converts some of those plant sugars into energy. Another animal might eat the first animal and convert some of those converted sugars into energy. Humans can either eat the plants or the animals for energy.
If something wanted to use humans for energy, they’d be getting solar energy from plants that have been eaten and partially used by a human body. It would be like having a solar panel hooked up to a heater that boils water to turn a turbine that charges a battery that you use to power what you need. It would be way more sensible to just hook up the solar panel to what you wanted to power.
That’s actually covered in matrix, humans covered the sun in an attempt to fight the then solar powered robots, although, the humans as battery thing was, as other mentioned, only because Hollywood execs thoughz people to be very stupid and not understanding brain as cpu
Alternate take: humans are a simple biological battery that can be harvested using systems already in place that the computers can just use like an API.
We’re a resource like trees.
We’re much worse batteries than an actual battery and we’re exponentially more difficult to maintain.
But we self replicate and all of our systems are already in place. We’re not ideal I’d wager but we’re an available resource.
Fossil fuels are a lot less efficient than solar energy … but we started there.
This is a cute idea for a movie and all but it’s incredibly impractical/unsustainable. If a system required that it’s energy storage be self-replicating (for whatever reason) then you would design and fabricate that energy storage solution for that system. Not be reliant on a calorically inefficiently produced sub-system (i.e. humans).
You literally need to grow an entire human just to store energy in it. Realistically, you’re looking at overfeeding a population with as much calorically dense, yet minimally energy intensive foodstuffs just to store energy in a material that’s less performant than paraffin wax (body fat has an energy density of about 39 MJ/kg versus paraffin wax at about 42 MJ/kg). That’s not to speak of the inefficiencies of the mixture of the storage medium (human muscle is about 5 times less energy dense than fat).
Our primative cerebrum will keep trying to wake up.
I read that we are terribly inefficient as a battery. Instead of feeding us, the sentient robots can take the food and burn it and have more power output from the food they would have fed us.
Yeah I mean might as well ignore the shadowy dude offering pills at that point because why wake up to that?
I never liked that part about The Matrix. It’d be an extremely inefficient process.
It was supposed to be humans were used as CPUs but they were concerned people wouldn’t understand. (So might at well go for the one that makes no sense? Yeah sure why not.)
Inefficient in what sense, burning trees is inefficient also but a viable and necessary stepping stone.
I’m not implying that the matrix is how it’s be I’m positing that we’re an already “designed” system they could extract a resource from, I doubt we’d be anything more than that is all, battery, processing power, bio sludge that they can gooify and convert to something they need for power generation or biological building, who knows.
Burning trees gave humans warmth in the cold and later, valuable carbon for making hotter fires to work metals.
Why would a computer need living batteries when it could just build a nuclear reactor and have steady energy for practically forever. Nuclear power also doesn’t need huge swaths of maintained farmland to feed it, and complicated sewer systems to dispose of the waste.
Even if an AI wanted to be green for some reason, it would be way more efficient to just have huge fields of solar panels. Remember, biological beings get their energy second or third hand, and practically all energy in the ecosystem comes from the sun. Plants take energy from the sun, and convert a fraction of that into sugars. An animal eats those plants and converts some of those plant sugars into energy. Another animal might eat the first animal and convert some of those converted sugars into energy. Humans can either eat the plants or the animals for energy.
If something wanted to use humans for energy, they’d be getting solar energy from plants that have been eaten and partially used by a human body. It would be like having a solar panel hooked up to a heater that boils water to turn a turbine that charges a battery that you use to power what you need. It would be way more sensible to just hook up the solar panel to what you wanted to power.
That’s actually covered in matrix, humans covered the sun in an attempt to fight the then solar powered robots, although, the humans as battery thing was, as other mentioned, only because Hollywood execs thoughz people to be very stupid and not understanding brain as cpu
Better as processors