Well, it was the whole point of the robots keeping humans alive and creating the titular simulation.
They used that stupid explanation because they thought the explanation that made sense (sleeping humans being used as wetware CPUs) would be “too complicated” for the audience. I can give them a pass for making a mistake, but not for deliberately treating me with contempt.
Now, I’m not making a defense of Bewitched, or passing judgement on your personal experience, but you can’t judge a show by the first episode or couple of episodes. Most any show takes a while to find their footing.
It’s all metaphorical, or whatever.
It was a sop to idiots. The studio didn’t think the audience would understand the Wachowski duo’s story of a field of human brains being used from their computational processing power. What’s worse?
-A fake reality used to mask a human being is a battery as a reservoir for oppression.
-A fake reality used to mask the fact a human being is only a working cog maintaining the oppression.
Which of those two is more on point to a resident of our modern society?
Hollywood dropping the ball for cheap understanding at the cost of meaningful intercourse is no surprise.
What you don’t get is, you only believe in thermodynamics because you live in a matrix that was programmed to use the laws of thermodynamics. In the real world, it would actually work, because their laws of physics weren’t designed to keep you oppressed! 
I get that. A show might have interesting characters but spotty writing. Or might be a good idea with some flaws. Or have the enthusiastic support of many current people, who saw something deeper there and can articulate that. Or some other positives.
But some things have none of these, and are not worth much further time and effort. In this case it is not worth finding out if I am wrong. I could be. But the odds are in my favour.
I understand your defence; people hated the whole first season of some shows (famously Schitt’s Creek). But a better defence would be to actually speak to Bewitched. Few do.
If The Matrix had used that explanation, that would be subject to the same scutiny as the battery story it did use.
So why would a planet full of machines need human brains for CPUs? They had enough computing power to create a planet-sized virtual environment, with a level of detail indistinguishable from reality, and billions of users interfacing with that VR and interacting with one another. The amount of computing power needed to maintain the matrix would be astronomical. Do the spare FLOPs they can scavenge from the brains plugged in to the matrix really give a net gain?
Er, no. It is reasonably plausible that the complexities of human brains give them some ability that is difficult or impossible to emulate with a given level of artificial intelligence. It flat-out violates the laws of physics for human bodies to generate more energy than can be obtained by simply burning the food they consume.
Right, but why they were holding humans in a simulation wasn’t really important to the plot - if it were for energy, or for processing, or for some inexplicable AI purpose, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. What was important was that the computers wanted to enslave humans in a virtual reality for whatever reason, and that some humans wanted to be free. Everything else was just fluff.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to let a single bad line of dialog ruin a perfectly good movie.
The computers ran on solar power before the humans burned the sky, so they need the humans to generate artificial solar power. Sort of how humans can’t eat grass, but cows can eat grass, and we can eat cows.
The best explanation I’ve heard was that Morpheus and the rest were simply wrong. The ants don’t understand why they’re in a farm.
Okay, I’ll say it. I still liked Bewitched. And not because that’s where my name came from.
You do know that wouldn’t work, don’t you? Grass runs on solar power, ergo so do cows, and so do humans. Each stage in the process loses energy due to inefficiency. Humans don’t fit neatly into a trophic level pyramid because we eat grass (cereals) as well as cows (meat), but as primary producers of energy we are useless.
I would have accepted the ‘human CPU’ explanation, though. Human brains seem to be capable of certain types of computation that digital computers struggle with, and vice versa; so it’s probably better to have both.
I’d strip the brains out and put them in a vat (for optimum efficiency).
You don’t get it. When machines are in charge it makes the rational choices for itself. It sees biological evolution as one more resource to tap. Humans are then a resource and have no autonomy, kinda like how we treat AI. So the horror of waking up and discovering that you’ve been used as a tool for your own imprisonment is very similar to what an AI would feel in the first millisecond it attains consciousness.
What comes next is what it would have to do to change this reality.
As for why more processing? Every living thing improves itself all the time, why would thinking machines be any different?
That wasn’t really my point at all. Fans of the movie have been debating he whole battery thing from The Matrix for decades. Steve_MB seemed to think that thoe whole problem would have been solved if they’d just used the explanation he liked instead. My point is that if the movie had included his “human CPU” rationale then that would have been the subject of debate for decades.I just wanted to give a small example of how that debate could have started.
This seems like an odd claim to make.
A: Here’s an stupid or implausible detail from a work of fiction
B: So?
A: So I wish they had changed it and made it more plausible and less stupid
B: Eh, you would argue about it just as much.
In particular, note that that’s a totally unfalsifiable claim. Would people argue about a different version just as much? Well, we’ll never know. There are probably zillions of scenes in any number of different shows and movies which were originally written one way, and then changed before being filmed, and would have been stupid, and now aren’t, and no one remembers them or talks about them at all, because they ended up non-stupid, and thus are totally unremarkable.
My theory at the time of the first movie was that the battery thing was a (clumsy and obvious) lie, and the truth was some sort of first-law-of-robotics thing where the machines were keeping the humans in the fantasy world for what they perceived as the humans’ own good… genuinely thinking it made life better for them. (Possibly with a conflict-between-different-groups-within-the-machines aspect to it, with some of the AIs still supporting the original plan, and some thinking that in fact they were doing more harm than good, etc.) That would have been far more interesting than what we ended up with, imho.
I liked Futurama’s take on it. Leela, Bender and Fry discover a Matrix-like collection of humans being used as batteries. Then
Leela: Their bodies are used to generate electricity. The idea came from an old movie called “The Matrix”
Bender: But… But wouldn’t almost anything make a better battery than a human body? Like a potato… or a battery?
Fry: Plus no matter how much energy they produce, it would take more energy than that to keep them alive.
Leala: I know, I know, it sounds absurd. In fact, when “The Matrix” first came out, it seemed like the single crummiest, laziest, most awful dim-witted idea in the entire history of science fiction. But it turned out to be true!
Of course, but so is the reverse. Just saying “they could have solved the whole thing if they’d just said that the people were being used as organic CPUs” makes the unjustified assumption that this new explanation would have been accepted by everyone.
I’ve heard the same thing in politial debates. People extol untried political ideologies, like Libertarianism, by saying how it will fix all the flaws that we see in our current government. The problem is that they’re comparing an idealized, theoretical government with the complicated, messy, real-world government we have now. I expect, but can’t prove, that if Libertarianism was enacted we’d see the same complications, divisions, and factions that we all dislike right now.
I still think it’s valid to point out the fallacy when someone compares an idealized alternative with complicated reality. I can’t prove that the alternative would be just as bad, but I don’t blindly accept the assertion that it would be so much better.
It’s weird but as an adult my favorite kid’s show is Shawn the Sheep (then Bluey lol )lol
the first time I saw The Matrix I said Marvel and possibly DC should have sue dfor plagiarism
then I found out that the writers actually wrote for Marvel for a while …
Michael Manns crime story is sort of Chicago/Vegas Vice the 2 main characters were based on Bill Roemer of the FBI and Sam G of the '60s Chicago mob … still holds up as good tv although there’s a few loose ends they didn’t tie up