The New Flesh

[andrewducker]

I just watched Second Renaissance part two, the final part of the animatrix to be released online.

It was all very pretty and nicely done - but I was severely annoyed (again) by the whole "The machines use the people as an energy source."

Apparently because there's no solar power due to the sky going dark, the machines use people as an energy source. Might one enquire exactly what they're feeding the people that doesn't require power to produce?

Comments

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

The most interesting argument I've seen in favor of the idea is here. Scroll down to "The Answer to The Matrix is Paste."

I just spent way too much time arguing about this very topic, as it happens. The problem I (and most people) see is not so much that the machines are doing something impossible, but that they are doing something extremely inefficient. It's a problem of motivation. Why would they do that?

[broin.livejournal.com]

Ether-cookies.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I tend to assume the humans have no clue what is really going on. Instead, I like the idea that the machines require unused portions of the humans' brains to run their programs because too many difficult to replace hardware was destroyed in the war.

[andrewducker]

I like that idea too - I was hoping that the new stuff would announce that the original statement was a misunderstanding by the humans. But sadly it doesn't look like it.

[worldforger.livejournal.com]

The creators were trying to make an amime, but with live actors. WHen I found taht out I stopped worrying about any of it making sense and just sat back to enjoy the show.
:-D

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

I really hated that bit. It is so stupid!!!! Why not use something that would give you less trouble, like cows!

[diffrentcolours]

If you can read ROT13, this has already been suggested by serpentstar.

(Hint: perl -pe 'tr/[A-Za-z]/[N-ZA-Mn-za-m]/' is your friend)

[diffrentcolours]

The film actually states that the machines use humans, "combined with a form of fusion", as power. Obviously this is bollocks, since any form of viable fusion would produce significantly more energy than could be generated from the entire human race. I do like the idea of them using human brains as distributed processing units, mind. I wonder when they'll port distcc to meatware...

[andrewducker]

yeah, I liked that idea too. Neil Gaiman used it in his Matrix story and I thought it worked well.