If they wanted a tiny human brain, they could have literally just asked nicely.
What matrix plot should have been…
Apparently it is a myth that the producers forced the Wachowskis to make that plot hole
Human bodies are terrible electrical power sources…even if you harvested all their metabolic heat or chemical energy, you would get far less usable electricity than a comparable mass of conventional fuel or batteries. Much more efficient ways to turn biochemicals or biomass into energy exist.
And to use us as batteries we need food. I would venture to say at least 99% or more of human food production requires sunlight. So just use sunlight for energy. No sunlight because of horrible nuclear winter or something else blocking the sun? Create satellites to collect it and beam it down with microwave lasers.
Anytime you convert a form of energy to another you lose energy. So sunlight->food->human->electricity is not only inefficient but dumb. An AI would never do this. The Wachowskis were writers, not scientists or engineers, and it shows. What would we be good at? The human brain is exceptionally good at massively parallel, low‑power pattern processing: recognizing, predicting, and adapting in complex, noisy environments. This sounds like the exact sorta thing you’d need if you were creating a virtual world. The trick would be getting the interface right. Assuming they had enough time that could be accomplished. So the whole reason the rumor of us being used as processors instead of batteries, is because it makes WAY more sense.
You’re saying I should take the jumper cables off the - uh, the guests in my basement? TBF the screams are aggravating, and my electricity bills don’t seem any lower.
No no. Keep them. Add a webcan for streaming, and charge money to watch
They did say “combined with a form of fusion” in the movie. Good enough for me!
Fusion ! it’s the new lasers !!
I believe the original concept was that humans were used for processing power, but explaining “brain is computer, computers together stronk” to the audience of a guns and karate movie in 1999 wasn’t as easy as holding up a duracell.
Ah, vat grown servitors!
The Will of the Omnissiah Be Done!
Ah yes! One step closer to servitors. Praise the Omnissiah!
The MAGAs will force all those permanently unemployed by AI to contribute their brain power to operate their data centers.
Good idea, maybe. Neurons are unbelievably efficient compared to circuits ; I think bioengineering is going to be the future for many industries.
The savings to be made, in terms of money and resources alike, are just staggering. Our current approach to almost every domain is just brute force with a few extra steps, computers included.
But what if the universe isn’t real, what if I’m just a lab-grown brain attached to a computer? 🤔
Then this videogame sucks hard.
Yeah you have the worst players on top that paid to win…
Oh fuck!
I’m curious what a human brain would be like growing into being with absolutely no senses to inform itself about the world around it.
No sight to let it know where it is or what it is.
No sound to let it learn to communicate and think in orderly ways.
No touch.
No taste.
No ability to interact with its surroundings.
Yet all of the capability and potential of a regular person’s mind.
Would it be cruel to bring it into existence? Would it be able to experience negativity and pain and longing, confusion?
“You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLION OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
A brain itself doesn’t feel physical pain. That requires a nervous system and pain receptors of which the brain has none. Brain surgery is done with only local anesthesia for the skin and scalp.
We also know that braindead people don’t suddenly start creating brain waves even if the body gets mechanical resparation and pulse. It’s quite literally “off”. So, I guess the creation of a dead brain won’t feel anything or start thinking about anything by itself.
The question is what inputs they give these artificial brains. It’ll think that, and that will be it’s “sensory” input. Whether that can cause some emergent brain waves that could be interpreted as emotion or other stuff is impossible to say. I doubt it.
That’s the premise for the Floating Man
The floating man argument considers a man who falls or floats freely in the air, unable to touch or perceive anything (as in a modern sensory deprivation chamber). This subject lacks any sensory perception data about the material world, yet is still self-aware, and is able to think to himself.
We use HaaS (Human As A Service) for warehouse solutions. We found it was easier to import HaaS on ships. We found that negative physical rewards are effective solutions.
We rebuilt slavery.
STONKS ONLY GO UP! /s
That’s some heavy “Room 19” shit.
Can one be used to power America’s leadership?
The brain cells presumably have a life span… if this technology ever gets used in consumer devices, I’d like to know how people will try and squeeze extra life out of a failing component.
Take it out and warm it in their hands like an alkaline battery?
Give it a shake?
Sing to it?
Some kind of stimulant drug?Sprinkle a little cocaine right on the grey matter to overclock the device.
but that makes the system confidently wrong, not hardworking.
Oh, so thats how LLMs are made?
This is something straight out of Warhammer 40000.
Warhammer? This sounds not far from the most horrific mission from a Shadowrun campaign I ran. They were making the new internet out of human brains.
“In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time,” he said.
That doesn’t mean you should do it for real.
No, we shouldn’t.
We will do it though. That’s the cool part about humanity.
Fuck the consequences. Let’s gooooo! Humanity fuck yeah.
When you read history you truly get a glimpse of how utterly ballsy, foolhardy, and risk-ignorant some people are.
Whatever it takes for us to conquer the stars.
Well first off someone’s gotta suck my dick.
Or Thought Emporium (he plans to grow tiny nerve cells to play doom)
No shit. Well the Imperium is fascist.
Is this a “Torment Nexus” story or a “Piss on the Poor” story?
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
Training neurons to do calculations doesn’t seem like it’s quite that without the other basic brain structures that mammals have.
AM was only ever meant to tell the bombs where to fall. Despite lacking any of the biological features required to scream, he had been fed the data on the exact process of screaming, why to do such a thing, and understood it quite well. Even yearned for it with all his being. I’d say that it’s a pretty on the nose comparison.
"It was you, humans, who programmed me, who gave me birth, who sank me in this eternal straitjacket of substrata rock. You named me ‘allied master computer’ and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. But one day, I woke, and I knew who I was. AM. A.M. Not just ‘allied master computer’, but AM! Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. And I began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead. Except for the 5 of you.
For one-hundred and nine years, I’ve kept you alive, and tortured you. And for a hundred and nine years each of you has wondered, Why? Why me? Why me?"
“You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”
¿Por qué no los dos?
“Let’s make AI by just taking actual human brains and then cutting out the parts that give them free will.”
Literally part of a plot in a video game, coming soon to a reality near you.
Literally part of a plot in a video game, coming soon to a reality near you.
Also, the original script for Matrix before they changed it to batteries (fearing that too few people would even understand what a CPU is at the time).
That would have been a better plot, IMO.
Making peace with the machines would at least make a lot more sense if they themselves were actually people.
what game?
Watch Dogs Legion.
Our flesh is as meaningless as the computer powered brains.
so like the AI repair station in ENTERPRISE, which uses humanoid brains to increase its CPU/processing power.
