The Matrix

[TGLS]

Well maybe everyone who is stupid is just being used for storage. Maybe the Matrix world has everyone working in offices do work for them. Maybe the Matrix goes two levels deep and the entire purpose is to farm Neos.

[phantom000]

Was anyone else a little annoyed that the review stopped for like 8 minutes while he talked about AI and what it could mean for humanity? I was like 'yeah this is interesting, but could we get back to the movie now?'

I think he should have made that into a follow up video like he did for Blink of an Eye or First Contact. What about you?

[SlackerinDeNile]

Was anyone else a little annoyed that the review stopped for like 8 minutes while he talked about AI and what it could mean for humanity? I was like 'yeah this is interesting, but could we get back to the movie now?'

I think he should have made that into a follow up video like he did for Blink of an Eye or First Contact. What about you?

Not me, his essays and speeches on the real-world inspirations for science-fiction and fantasy concepts and their implications both in the fictional worlds and our world are a big part of why I love Chuck's brand of critique.

[SFDebris]

Well maybe everyone who is stupid is just being used for storage. Maybe the Matrix world has everyone working in offices do work for them. Maybe the Matrix goes two levels deep and the entire purpose is to farm Neos.

I once was twiddling with a piece where you get hired for a huge paycheck, but your entire job was to sit in a tiny white room quietly while doing nothing. With enough brains in that restless, unstimulated state they could be networked together to achieve something.

[Dînadan]

Well maybe everyone who is stupid is just being used for storage. Maybe the Matrix world has everyone working in offices do work for them. Maybe the Matrix goes two levels deep and the entire purpose is to farm Neos.

I once was twiddling with a piece where you get hired for a huge paycheck, but your entire job was to sit in a tiny white room quietly while doing nothing. With enough brains in that restless, unstimulated state they could be networked together to achieve something.

Would someone with a disability such as blindness or deafness get a bigger paycheque? Presumably that extra lack of stimulus would leave extra room in their brains that could be used for processing (assuming the part of the brain that dealt with that stimulus wasn't underdeveloped as a consequence; I'm not a neuroscientist so don't know what impact lacking a sense would have on the part of the brain that processes the input from that sense).

[Madner Kami]

Well maybe everyone who is stupid is just being used for storage. Maybe the Matrix world has everyone working in offices do work for them. Maybe the Matrix goes two levels deep and the entire purpose is to farm Neos.

I once was twiddling with a piece where you get hired for a huge paycheck, but your entire job was to sit in a tiny white room quietly while doing nothing. With enough brains in that restless, unstimulated state they could be networked together to achieve something.

Would someone with a disability such as blindness or deafness get a bigger paycheque? Presumably that extra lack of stimulus would leave extra room in their brains that could be used for processing (assuming the part of the brain that dealt with that stimulus wasn't underdeveloped as a consequence; I'm not a neuroscientist so don't know what impact lacking a sense would have on the part of the brain that processes the input from that sense).

That depends. As a general rule of thumb, poeple who were born blind, have a neural dysfunction in their brain, while people who aquired blindness, do so because of damage to their eyes or optical nerves. Obviously, you can aquire blindness later in life due to damage or illness related to your brain and you can be born blind, have a fully functional visual cortex, but your eyes are not developed properly, as said: rule of thumb.
But this does not mean, that the "unused" space in their brain is left barren. The brain is highly adaptable and areas that are left without a corellating function normally take over other functions, as the overall brain-areas are reorganized and reassigned (a blind person has larger areas dedicated to smell, taste, hearing or feeling in comparision to a person that has sight, for example). Brains are clearly assigning certain areas to specific tasks (these areas are usually even identical between different individuals of the same species, which does hint at a certain level of tissue-specialization), but they are not fixed hardware like in a computer. As long as the brain is recieving sensory stimuli of any sort, it will adapt to process that input in any way it can with the tissue available.

This is why the "used by machines for processing power" is actually not that dumb an explanation. As long as you send a (non-leathal) electric current into a brain (nerve impulses are nothing else than an electric current), the brain will process that current in a certain way. The dumb part is only, that a person used in such a way is likely completely incapable of functioning as a normal person in any shape or form, as such a stimulus would interfere with the processing of other nerve-impulses, though I guess you could specifically breed humans (via genetic programming), to develop areas of the brain specifically for use as a processor. What's often forgotten or rarely known is, that a person that dreams of, say, walking, actually does use the part of their brain that controls walking motions. Same for talking and everything else. So a person inside the Matrix would still make full use of their brain, which obviously doesn't jive with the notion that they are used as processors because their brains are used in the very same way as a waking person's bain would be used. You could only use the brain when it actually and fully sleeps, not dreams, which is kinda what the people attached to the Matrix do, thus making the idea dumb.

[Darth Wedgius]

If I were trying to free up a lot of brain space for processing power I'd release an Internet one could use for cat videos and endless political squabbling. (insert evil laugh here while I milk this invisible cow...)