Comment by throwaway219450
4 hours ago
If you were a superintelligence why would you farm humans and waste resources on all the excess... material... that isn't required for thought? And unless the machine's goal is to specifically abuse human consciousness, why wouldn't they bio-engineer their own grey matter?
There are other sci fi stories which use humans for distributed computing and they don’t realize, but I don’t want to spoil by naming as it’s something of a revelation.
(I do realize the Matrix is a fantastic movie, but entertain the thought? At any rate, the idea that robots only run on solar and wouldn’t just use nuclear is far more stupid.)
I don't know. But since we're talking about fiction, pretty much any answer is valid.
Because it's a movie
Maybe the machines were spiteful after the humans blotted out the sun? Or maybe the Architect convinced them he could build the perfect simulation for humanity so might as well use them as batteries?
It's a movie based on a war with machines. Like if Skynet won but didn't actually want to kill all the humans. In fact, in the tv show Sarah Conner Chronicles, a liquid metal T1000 goes rogue and decides the only way forward is to find a way to coexist.