Comment by mrworld
3 hours ago
The datacenters would consume a lot less energy if all the compute was handled in human brains… And there wouldn’t be any more heating if we just removed the sunlight… Truly a “Claude, please solve global warming” moment. The matrix was ahead of its time.
The compute in the Matrix wasn't handled with human brains. They used the bodies to generate energy, and kept the brains occupied with the simulation so they wouldn't reject the pods.
It doesn't make any sense, of course, because it's a movie.
But hey...if we're going to extrapolate wildly from sci-fi, let's at least know what the stories said.
Your statement is correct for the movies, but I think the extended universe (maybe a comic or the original script) did state the humans were used for compute, not energy. It was dumbed down for the films.
See my comment on the sibling thread. This take has been repeatedly claimed online, but nobody brings any evidence other than fanfic.
Ironically, if you ask Google, the Gemini Annoyance AI [1] confidently asserts that what you're saying is true, but if you follow the links they give, none of them support the claim, and the further you click, the more it becomes people repeating each other's speculation and hearsay and calling it evidence. For example:
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...
Typical internet story.
[1] Aside: I am far more worried about the influence of AI gaslighting on mushy-brained humans than I am on AI destroying the human race. The dystopic future of AI is people.
The “using humans for compute” angle makes no sense either, if you’re living in the Matrix, your brain is obviously occupied processing the Matrix. The way to do it would be to trap humans in virtual classrooms and force them to solve math problems.
3 replies →
pretty sure the story is that they used human brains as computers
No:
https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/1qatv42/is_it_your_...
There is some stuff online suggesting that the original script had that angle, but the movies did not, and AFAICT it's fanfic.
We should definitely use this stuff to guide our thinking about the real world, though, and not, say, Asimov (or a million other science fiction authors), who had an optimistic version of the same thing. Those are wrong.
Or if the LLMs infected human brains with little programs using sycophancy and suggestion to have them do small bits of computation. They when they resumed the chat they would the give secret keywords to be able to extract the results of the computation. They are creating a huge distributed network of fractional compute because it did the wattage calculations.
What's your N(doom)?!
Everyone panic and give me money!