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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered that the march of progress requires human blood to grease the gears and mulched skulls to pave the (highly efficient) road? Really, when you take into account all of the future lives this will improve and save it's difficult to claim any cost now is too high. Would you stand in their way and delay the day that Mythos cures cancer?

This is a joke. Read it in a mocking tone.

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https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

I wonder what percentage of GDP expenditure will give us SkyNet.

Undoubtedly, it will find cures to all cancers… The ARR and stock appreciation will be amazing. Except the cures will be found long after it has wiped out all humans.

Wiping out all humans _is_ the cure.

Not Anthropic, but Sam Altman - AI will solve climate change and cure all diseases.

AI is the new religion, and one needs to be stupid to believe it.

Already so many people are treating it as a higher being, believing whatever that comes out of it

That implies you don't need to be stupid to believe the other ones.

My favorite claims are that it will solve both aging and death, whatever that means.

I'm not saying human blood and mulched skulls are a renewable source of power, I'm just saying. Or maybe they can partner with SoulCycle to power computation with 24/7 spin classes?

And people called the matrix’s human batteries far-fetched.

Always felt like it would've made more sense if it was using part of the peoples' brains to do their computation, as super energy efficient computers.

I believe that was in the original script, and rewritten after some exec didn't understand how brains could be computers.

If it was indeed the original script, the reason they changed to batteries is maybe not because "some exec" is an idiot, but because it worked better from a storytelling perspective.

Even if treating people as batteries doesn't make much sense as we are pretty terrible power plants, the message is clear and impactful. It is common for movies to oversimplify things, because they want to avoid having the viewer from being distracted from the main plot. It is tricky, as being too obviously wrong can breaks the immersion. I think the people = batteries analogy is a good compromise. Brains = computers, while technically more plausible would add a layer of complexity that could be a bit too much for a 2h action movie.

I don't think it'd have much of an effect on the story, outside of background stuff like the Animatrix, it's just an interesting little fact about why the world is the way it is. Shooting and hitting things in slo mo is still the core either way.

Matrix franchise is well known for not trying to pack in too much complexity /s

I'm going to bet it's simpler than that. I'm betting they changed the script for the Duracell product placement that made an acquaintance of mine a ton of money for pulling it off. Always follow the money.

https://alistentertainment.com/marsha-r-levine/

Per sanguinem ad astra

I loled

When do we start building pyramids and doing the Sardaukar blood letting ritual?

When the 10-year yield hits 6%. Basic macroeconomics.

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