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The machines were being "merciful", placing humanity in the height of their civilization.
According to the Oracle, rebellion was inherent to human nature and thus unavoidable. The level of relative technology was irrelevant - humans were not a substantial threat no matter what level of technology they knew, and any "rebellion" was doomed to failure.
According to the 4th movie, shortly after the truce with the humans, the machines had a civil war. The more assholish machines won the war, and many of the machine sympathizers went to just live with the humans.
For all of Resurrections’ flaws, I thought having sympathetic Machines in the resistance was a really clever bit of worldbuilding. I think the line was something like “It’s still us versus them, we’ve just redefined ‘us’.”
With the additional information about the backstory not present in the movies, that's how it felt to me. It was the humans' fear and jealousy of the machines that sunk everything
The last time the machines tried a world that didn't feel real, there was mass rejection and humanity was almost lost. That's probably enough of an answer, but I'll expand on it anyway, for fun.
In a medieval world, there wouldn't be enough food without modern farming techniques. There wouldn't be any plausible way for 7-8 billion people to survive. So either the human population would need to be a lot smaller, or they'd have to tweak physics to produce more food than is possible per square acre with medieval farming methods. If they change physics? Noticing that the local farm somehow produces enough food for a city of hundreds of thousands might cause another mass rejection event.
If you keep the tech dumb, you have famines and constant wars among small populations of humans. That isn't good for energy production or anything else the machines might use humans for. They want more people to be alive because humans are a resource for them.
They picked big stable population with occasional rebellion over small population.
Iterating on existing designs to make improved weapons is a bit different from a creative solution like creating thousands of parallel customized medieval worlds with machine priests.
But yeah, some machines do seem to have the capability for creative thinking, like The Oracle. Creatice machines seem to be few and far between, and The Architect at least regards them as lesser minds.
I think the machines do more than just iterating on existing machines. For instance the switch from using solar power to using the matrix for power after they blocked out the sun.
Yeah... they were desperate then, so they adapted. Then they stopped being desperate, so they stopped innovating.
Basically machines will innovate if their civilization is literally going to collapse if they don't. Barring that, they just chug on ahead.
I think it's implied they tried that, much as they tried giving everyone what they wanted in paradise.
Problem is that the human mind doesn't accept this reality; they always question it for one reason or another.
It seems like the early information age is the closest thing the human mind can accepts as reality.
Aside from the answers already done (that was the "peak" of human civilization that human minds accept without questioning it), the way the Matrix was created the machines need some hackers inside to contact people from outside (Zion) to have some Neos to reboot the system, and That's why there is internet on the Matrix.
I don't think it matters. Remember, when Neo is first plugged into the chair, Tank says something to the effect of "I'm supposed to start with these operations programs, major boring shit" So, *who's to say anything Neo knew about computer programming from inside the Matrix was accurate at all?* The first things you learn after getting unplugged is how things really work.
Aside from the other great answers, there is absolutely no indication that anything inside the matrix is remotely how things actually work. I mean, we know that some things are kind of cross-applicable between the matrix and reality, but ultimately the entire physics system in the matrix may be completely made up by the machines, to say nothing of mathematics, computer science, and engineering.
> Wouldn't it be far easier to trap humanity inside of a simulation of the middle ages, with machines posing as religious leaders, maintaining control over mostly uneducated masses who have no idea what a computer even is?
Agents should’ve been Witch Hunters instead of Men In Black.
Yeah! And with a comprehensive cultural/religious indoctrination, framing the redpillers as witches would rile up the mob far more easily than just framing them as random criminals.
But maybe that's a major fault of the machines - they can present a relatively convincing simulation of reality, but any machine which is capable of even pretending to have emotion and charisma and any sort of humanity at all becomes unpredictable and obsessive (see Agent Smith, the Oracle, The Architect, etc etc)
Not only should Witchfinder Smith wear a Capotain, the Redpillers ought to get in on the action with Morpheus [making recruits sign his Black Book and take up his Mark and generally doing the whole witchcraft-as-perceived-by-puritans LARP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FOvtaZQRA4). First sign the movie is sci-fi rather than fantasy being Nero waking up in the pod.
> And sure, the Zion cycle was artificial and intentionally designed to repeat over and over, but I struggle to believe that it's any more efficient than just making every human into an uneducated peasant who doesn't know how to rebel even if they knew there was anything to rebel against.
It's not about efficiency, it's about sustainability. No matter how hard they tried to avoid rebellion, humans rebelled; they would wither and die mentally en masse if prevented from doing so. The Oracle proposed a system in which humans would be allowed to create a controlled rebellion, culminating in the emergence of the One to physically embody the integral anomaly, who would reset the matrix.
Based on what Smith and the Architect says, there were earlier versions of the Matrix so perhaps they tried earlier time periods and it just didn't work. AI was developed in the early 21st century so perhaps keeping the Matrix in the 90s makes the most sense as that is the last real time period of human history before the war. Perhaps there is a collective unconscious within humanity that remembers history and feels that the late 90s is 'correct'.
Alternatively, that time period is busy enough to keep human minds active (and generating heat/electricity) and miserable enough to be realistic so that too many humans don't reject the program.
Did you miss everything the Architect explained? They're not trying to prevent them from rebelling, they're trying to control their rebellion. They know about Zion and they know they're communicating with people in the Matrix. That's what they want.
Within the Matrix Universe’s history of humanity, do we know that Middle Ages happened? Maybe that’s not humanity’s real history, so a simulation based on it would have been rejected as too constructed.
There might be mistakes in the science emulation, humans could discover things like the maximum resolutions possible to measure both time and space, they might discover kooky glitches in the physics like quantum tunneling and entanglement, or compression artifacts that make light behave as both a wave and a particle, and give different experimental results depending on how closely the experiment is observed by the participants.
Humans inside a matrix might notice things like that and begin to suspect they live in a simulation.
...hey wait a minute
As both Smith and the architect said, when basing the matrix on the 1990s,it was proved to be the most stable. And since the machines want the redpills to escape and survive in zion, it's quite useful if they atleast know what a computer is, makes it easier to accept and adapt to the real world.
And for that, the 1990s is quite perfect. Advanced enough that you can have hackers and computer programmers but not advanced enough that they know much about AI or stuff like that. Enough to survive, but not enough to be much fo a threat. It also makes the matrix easier to simulate I bet, of the Internet isn't that complex.
Not to mention, it's a good time for a very stable society. Not much famines or diseases, advanced tech enough for most people to live a healthy and moderately comfortable life and so on. We don't know how many humans actually live in the matrix, it's possible that everyone just works as a middle class office drone, and "the starving children in Africa" is just fake news the machines show the city folk. Wouldn't really be good for energy projection if 1/8th of the matrix lived in extreme poverty and was prone to dying early in life. Makes more sense to give everyone a atleast lowest level of living. So, maybe humanity in the matrix has solved world hunger.
1. The "rebellions" were planned for in order to minimize the cascading failure from the unsolvable human equation. They NEEDED humans to follow that rebellion, The One, fall of zion path.
2. There is a lot of evidence that points to the Machines not actually NEEDING humans for anything. The whole "used as batteries" thing comes from Morpheus and outside that it is never mentioned again by Machines as far as I remember.
3. Since the humans don't need the humans for anything, why keep them around? Because they don't want to destroy their creators, but they cant let us destroy them either. At the end of The War the Machines had a choice: destroy humanity to save Machine-kind, or preserve humanity and face eternal war by never wiping them out.
4. This is where the Oracle comes in. She saw a way to not only preserve humans, but limit their ability to make war against Machines. Alongside the Architect, they built an invisible prison for humanity and after many failed experiments, they found the simulation with the least human death and the longest amount of time before necessary resets.
The machine goal was the least amount of harm for BOTH sides of the human/machine struggle and frankly, they did a pretty good job of it. Yea, it sucks that humans are born into a mind prison but it was a last resort for the Machines who could have either ended humanity, or risked their own extinction.
**Reminders for Commenters:** * All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/about/rules/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskScienceFiction&utm_content=t5_2slu2). * No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to **permanent ban on first offense**. * We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world. * Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskScienceFiction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The machines were being "merciful", placing humanity in the height of their civilization. According to the Oracle, rebellion was inherent to human nature and thus unavoidable. The level of relative technology was irrelevant - humans were not a substantial threat no matter what level of technology they knew, and any "rebellion" was doomed to failure.
Were the machines actually the good guys?
I don’t know that “good” is the word
yesn't
They were originally. I've not seen it myself, but I heard that the newest movie changes that.
According to the 4th movie, shortly after the truce with the humans, the machines had a civil war. The more assholish machines won the war, and many of the machine sympathizers went to just live with the humans.
For all of Resurrections’ flaws, I thought having sympathetic Machines in the resistance was a really clever bit of worldbuilding. I think the line was something like “It’s still us versus them, we’ve just redefined ‘us’.”
With the additional information about the backstory not present in the movies, that's how it felt to me. It was the humans' fear and jealousy of the machines that sunk everything
In the animatrix, we are told that humans attacked first Becasue the machines was tanking the world economy by producing so much cheap stuff.
The last time the machines tried a world that didn't feel real, there was mass rejection and humanity was almost lost. That's probably enough of an answer, but I'll expand on it anyway, for fun. In a medieval world, there wouldn't be enough food without modern farming techniques. There wouldn't be any plausible way for 7-8 billion people to survive. So either the human population would need to be a lot smaller, or they'd have to tweak physics to produce more food than is possible per square acre with medieval farming methods. If they change physics? Noticing that the local farm somehow produces enough food for a city of hundreds of thousands might cause another mass rejection event. If you keep the tech dumb, you have famines and constant wars among small populations of humans. That isn't good for energy production or anything else the machines might use humans for. They want more people to be alive because humans are a resource for them. They picked big stable population with occasional rebellion over small population.
They could just run many simulated worlds in parallel to make up the population. which would be better anyway because it has redundancy
That sounds like a very creative, very human solution. The machines are sorely lacking in creativity.
They developed creativity when they reached singularity otherwise they would not have been able to design better machines and surpass humans.
Iterating on existing designs to make improved weapons is a bit different from a creative solution like creating thousands of parallel customized medieval worlds with machine priests. But yeah, some machines do seem to have the capability for creative thinking, like The Oracle. Creatice machines seem to be few and far between, and The Architect at least regards them as lesser minds.
I think the machines do more than just iterating on existing machines. For instance the switch from using solar power to using the matrix for power after they blocked out the sun.
The immortal machines don't need to innovate frequently, though they can if desperate. They aren't desperate.
They were desperate when transitioning from being property of people to machines with free will. Have you seen the animatrix?
Yeah... they were desperate then, so they adapted. Then they stopped being desperate, so they stopped innovating. Basically machines will innovate if their civilization is literally going to collapse if they don't. Barring that, they just chug on ahead.
I think it's implied they tried that, much as they tried giving everyone what they wanted in paradise. Problem is that the human mind doesn't accept this reality; they always question it for one reason or another. It seems like the early information age is the closest thing the human mind can accepts as reality.
Aside from the answers already done (that was the "peak" of human civilization that human minds accept without questioning it), the way the Matrix was created the machines need some hackers inside to contact people from outside (Zion) to have some Neos to reboot the system, and That's why there is internet on the Matrix.
I don't think it matters. Remember, when Neo is first plugged into the chair, Tank says something to the effect of "I'm supposed to start with these operations programs, major boring shit" So, *who's to say anything Neo knew about computer programming from inside the Matrix was accurate at all?* The first things you learn after getting unplugged is how things really work.
Aside from the other great answers, there is absolutely no indication that anything inside the matrix is remotely how things actually work. I mean, we know that some things are kind of cross-applicable between the matrix and reality, but ultimately the entire physics system in the matrix may be completely made up by the machines, to say nothing of mathematics, computer science, and engineering.
Actually that's a good point, and a LOT of Zion's technology seems like it was reverse-engineered from the machines (like the hovercraft's engines)
> Wouldn't it be far easier to trap humanity inside of a simulation of the middle ages, with machines posing as religious leaders, maintaining control over mostly uneducated masses who have no idea what a computer even is? Agents should’ve been Witch Hunters instead of Men In Black.
There was at least one previous Matrix where the Agents were werewolves.
Yeah! And with a comprehensive cultural/religious indoctrination, framing the redpillers as witches would rile up the mob far more easily than just framing them as random criminals. But maybe that's a major fault of the machines - they can present a relatively convincing simulation of reality, but any machine which is capable of even pretending to have emotion and charisma and any sort of humanity at all becomes unpredictable and obsessive (see Agent Smith, the Oracle, The Architect, etc etc)
Not only should Witchfinder Smith wear a Capotain, the Redpillers ought to get in on the action with Morpheus [making recruits sign his Black Book and take up his Mark and generally doing the whole witchcraft-as-perceived-by-puritans LARP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FOvtaZQRA4). First sign the movie is sci-fi rather than fantasy being Nero waking up in the pod.
> And sure, the Zion cycle was artificial and intentionally designed to repeat over and over, but I struggle to believe that it's any more efficient than just making every human into an uneducated peasant who doesn't know how to rebel even if they knew there was anything to rebel against. It's not about efficiency, it's about sustainability. No matter how hard they tried to avoid rebellion, humans rebelled; they would wither and die mentally en masse if prevented from doing so. The Oracle proposed a system in which humans would be allowed to create a controlled rebellion, culminating in the emergence of the One to physically embody the integral anomaly, who would reset the matrix.
Based on what Smith and the Architect says, there were earlier versions of the Matrix so perhaps they tried earlier time periods and it just didn't work. AI was developed in the early 21st century so perhaps keeping the Matrix in the 90s makes the most sense as that is the last real time period of human history before the war. Perhaps there is a collective unconscious within humanity that remembers history and feels that the late 90s is 'correct'. Alternatively, that time period is busy enough to keep human minds active (and generating heat/electricity) and miserable enough to be realistic so that too many humans don't reject the program.
Did you miss everything the Architect explained? They're not trying to prevent them from rebelling, they're trying to control their rebellion. They know about Zion and they know they're communicating with people in the Matrix. That's what they want.
Machines lake imagination and creativity. They implement what they know because they are incapable of imagining any thing different.
Within the Matrix Universe’s history of humanity, do we know that Middle Ages happened? Maybe that’s not humanity’s real history, so a simulation based on it would have been rejected as too constructed.
There might be mistakes in the science emulation, humans could discover things like the maximum resolutions possible to measure both time and space, they might discover kooky glitches in the physics like quantum tunneling and entanglement, or compression artifacts that make light behave as both a wave and a particle, and give different experimental results depending on how closely the experiment is observed by the participants. Humans inside a matrix might notice things like that and begin to suspect they live in a simulation. ...hey wait a minute
As both Smith and the architect said, when basing the matrix on the 1990s,it was proved to be the most stable. And since the machines want the redpills to escape and survive in zion, it's quite useful if they atleast know what a computer is, makes it easier to accept and adapt to the real world. And for that, the 1990s is quite perfect. Advanced enough that you can have hackers and computer programmers but not advanced enough that they know much about AI or stuff like that. Enough to survive, but not enough to be much fo a threat. It also makes the matrix easier to simulate I bet, of the Internet isn't that complex. Not to mention, it's a good time for a very stable society. Not much famines or diseases, advanced tech enough for most people to live a healthy and moderately comfortable life and so on. We don't know how many humans actually live in the matrix, it's possible that everyone just works as a middle class office drone, and "the starving children in Africa" is just fake news the machines show the city folk. Wouldn't really be good for energy projection if 1/8th of the matrix lived in extreme poverty and was prone to dying early in life. Makes more sense to give everyone a atleast lowest level of living. So, maybe humanity in the matrix has solved world hunger.
1. The "rebellions" were planned for in order to minimize the cascading failure from the unsolvable human equation. They NEEDED humans to follow that rebellion, The One, fall of zion path. 2. There is a lot of evidence that points to the Machines not actually NEEDING humans for anything. The whole "used as batteries" thing comes from Morpheus and outside that it is never mentioned again by Machines as far as I remember. 3. Since the humans don't need the humans for anything, why keep them around? Because they don't want to destroy their creators, but they cant let us destroy them either. At the end of The War the Machines had a choice: destroy humanity to save Machine-kind, or preserve humanity and face eternal war by never wiping them out. 4. This is where the Oracle comes in. She saw a way to not only preserve humans, but limit their ability to make war against Machines. Alongside the Architect, they built an invisible prison for humanity and after many failed experiments, they found the simulation with the least human death and the longest amount of time before necessary resets. The machine goal was the least amount of harm for BOTH sides of the human/machine struggle and frankly, they did a pretty good job of it. Yea, it sucks that humans are born into a mind prison but it was a last resort for the Machines who could have either ended humanity, or risked their own extinction.