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).
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.)
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).
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.)