Think The Matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
Using nmap to find a vulnerable ssh server for the SSH CRC32 attack.
(I also like Eliezer Yudkowsky's theory that the Laws of Thermodynamics are an in-simulation creation by the machines, and humans-as-batteries works according to the laws of the real universe.)
Humans are just too stupid/arrogant to believe it.
If we get a little bit too annoying or dangerous they just cull us the same way we cull foxes or bears attacking livestock. We are never really a threat to them. Especially if you consider that they are a million steps ahead of us given their intelligence.
A single AI being is more intelligent than the entire human race that has ever lived; there are millions of independent AI's in the machine society. Once you look at it this way it is laughable to think that humans have even a tiny chance against an entire society of AI entities.
We think we pose a threat the same way a bear thinks it posses a threat against an armed human. The bear may get lucky against a few humans but against the entire human species it has zero chance.
Also, given that the mind of an AI is just software they are virtually immortal. Every time humans "kill" a machine it is just a piece of hardware that is being destroyed. The mind is still intact. So yeah, as soon as a sentient AI comes into being, the fight will be over before it starts. We think we are intelligent but just look at how long it takes us to study for a career. An AI will be able to learn all of human knowledge in a virtual instant. We are doomed!
If you follow this line of thinking you can fill a lot of the plot holes in the movies.
The agents are just zookeepers.
Most likely than not each single being is completely independent from each other. For all we know it is only the "zoo" that is being affected. You know, the same way that a whole bunch of animals in a herd get an infection and die.
Planet earth is big, and by this point all of it is populated by AI beings. They are probably using fusion energy and traveling to the stars already. This whole thing is probably just an isolated incident.
For all we know this is by design to keep the humans from dying off of boredom. Or maybe and most likely this is just an experiment some curious AI is running the same way we run experiments with rats and mazes. Since they are virtually immortal they can run an experiment for hundreds of years.
It could be that the fall of human civilization happened millions of years ago. The problem with the skies is just the result of climate change or changes with the sun. Since the machines live in a virtual reality they don't care what is the environment on Earth.
Even without that, batteries are a store of energy, not a source, and perhaps the machines had discovered some unknown laws of nature that involved intelligent biological creatures being the only way to store or transform some sort of energy currently unknown to man. That is no more or less far fetched than the machines and ships using some sort of antigravity capabilities to fly.
There are plenty of ways to explain the technology in the matrix that isn't completely ridiculous.
I honestly thought I'd read that CPUs were the original intention but the studios changed it to batteries but can't find any source now.
Some hint about it here[1] but no conclusive proof.
[1] http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive...
Or maybe the implants he had worked as transmitter/receivers and he was picking up on the chatter between the machines. It could be part of the reason why he could control so much of the virtual world. Maybe all implants had some form of wifi and Neo's was just unusually strong. Why the wifi? So that they could be switched to a different pod without loosing their connection to the matrix.
One can just keep going and going with alternative explanations.
Using them as batteries reduced those numbers which is a plus, and meant the machines didn't have to build a new store of energy, and could use the existing humans.
Apparently this concept was far too difficult for test audiences to understand so it was scrapped.
"Humans are batteries when the sun goes out!" Is easy for people to understand.
"Human minds are computers but in order to use human minds as computers we need to make the matrix as a semi-corporeal realm, oh and this is why people like Trinity can do impossible things like jump really far because their minds are so powerful and actually used in the calculations of the matrix that they can impact it's outcome."
Was the part that was too complex.
I really enjoyed this documentary on Philosophy and the Matrix - https://vimeo.com/53000177
The machines were harnessing the unused parts of the human brain to create a gigantic supercomputer, but one that was capable of intuitive leaps, blah, blah, blah, lost interest....double backflip scissor kick to the face. Whoa did you see that?
I'm tempted to reach back even farther, but classical Greek drama was generally completely rooted in divine miracles because that was how most people thought the world actually worked back then, and you could get in trouble for saying otherwise, as Socrates discovered. However, in Plato's Dialogues Socrates puts in a lot of time displaying or eliciting military knowledge from his interlocutors, since they were the elite of Athenian society and Plato's target audience for his ideas on statecraft.
How can we know this? Who is "most people"?
If Shakespeare wrote to please the aristocracy, might it be possible that the surviving Greek writing was written to please some other set of elites / religious authority / etc.
Edited to add: I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys", much like we do today about whatever we don't believe.
I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys"
That's because you have a host of other ideas to draw on. What if you didn't have all that scientific knowledge and people in your village started dying mysteriously? Look at how people are in undeveloped places, if they're not educated they tend to blame evil spirits or say that someone caused a curse to fall on the village and suchlike.
Yes, the reference to our contemporaries in less developed areas is a good one. I listened to an Australian ABC Radio National podcast recently that talked about tuberculosis on the islands between Australia and Indonesian and they brought up how the locals believes about the disease made it more difficult to treat.
It's a typical work day for me.
Of course some people just won't find the show funny, and that's fine. But a lot of very experienced, talented people put a lot of work into that show; it would be unfortunate to dismiss it entirely.
(And for the record, I personally don't find the show funny in the least bit.)
I never really understood the idea that this is meaningfully different from a canned laughter track. A live audience applauding because the applause light goes on isn't any more authentic than a editor mixing it in. It's just easier to make the end product sound like it flows realistically.
And while there may not be a "laughter" light, the audience knows that they're expected to laugh at the punchlines. Just like they know to "ooh" and "aww" at all the right moments too. In fact the crowd warm-up often tells them to make sure they laugh and laugh loud enough for the microphones to pick it up.
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In either case, the reason people bounce off of laughter in the mix is because the jokes don't land. It's the fact people would find it funny that people complaining about the "laugh track" perceive as artificial. Not because the audio is stilted enough that someone can recognize it as edited in after the fact. Getting pedantic about the colloquial use of "laugh track" or "canned" is generally irrelevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKoVsHs_Ko
Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.