Comment by emkoemko

4 hours ago

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.