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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

PlayPump failed, as so many others, because children do not make good horses. Countless projects in many fields have attempted to "harness" children for energy. There was the soccer/football generator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeb2fyHKirQ). I've even seen attempts to install power-generating floor tiles in English schools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9AZxB55xjI). We think we can tell children what to do, use them as beasts of burden, but they are not a reliable power source.

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We can make children be our beasts of burden, it's just that the techniques required tend to be frowned upon in modern civilization.

"... children ... are not a reliable power source."

Tell that to The Matrix ;)

The problem with the Matrix is even with made-up physics, they did a terrible job writing in humans as a power source into the plot. That's a fairly low bar and they failed.

I've always thought this too but I haven't come up with a better plot device

Me too. I always thought it would have been better if humans' processing cycles (thoughts) were utilised to supplement, validate and expand the Matrix. A sort of automatic, involuntary, unaware Mechanical Turk.

I think it's a better and more terrifying plot if you watch it as a Kafka-esque dystopia where people are imprisoned by the machines for inscrutable reasons that no-one truly knows. Morpheus's power supply theory is then just a necessary rationalization and a part of the mythology that allows the resistance to continue, while being fundamentally incorrect.

Thermodynamic impossibility is a relatively minor obstacle for a true believer.

It is claimed that in the original script, humans were used as a computing resource instead of an energy resource, but the idea was scrapped because it was too complicated to understand. A bit like lovemenot next to here indicates.

Discussion: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive...

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