Human bodies are terrible electrical power sources…even if you harvested all their metabolic heat or chemical energy, you would get far less usable electricity than a comparable mass of conventional fuel or batteries. Much more efficient ways to turn biochemicals or biomass into energy exist.

And to use us as batteries we need food. I would venture to say at least 99% or more of human food production requires sunlight. So just use sunlight for energy. No sunlight because of horrible nuclear winter or something else blocking the sun? Create satellites to collect it and beam it down with microwave lasers.

Anytime you convert a form of energy to another you lose energy. So sunlight->food->human->electricity is not only inefficient but dumb. An AI would never do this. The Wachowskis were writers, not scientists or engineers, and it shows. What would we be good at? The human brain is exceptionally good at massively parallel, low‑power pattern processing: recognizing, predicting, and adapting in complex, noisy environments. This sounds like the exact sorta thing you’d need if you were creating a virtual world. The trick would be getting the interface right. Assuming they had enough time that could be accomplished. So the whole reason the rumor of us being used as processors instead of batteries, is because it makes WAY more sense.

Then this videogame sucks hard.

“You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLION OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”

A brain itself doesn’t feel physical pain. That requires a nervous system and pain receptors of which the brain has none. Brain surgery is done with only local anesthesia for the skin and scalp.

We also know that braindead people don’t suddenly start creating brain waves even if the body gets mechanical resparation and pulse. It’s quite literally “off”. So, I guess the creation of a dead brain won’t feel anything or start thinking about anything by itself.

The question is what inputs they give these artificial brains. It’ll think that, and that will be it’s “sensory” input. Whether that can cause some emergent brain waves that could be interpreted as emotion or other stuff is impossible to say. I doubt it.

We use HaaS (Human As A Service) for warehouse solutions. We found it was easier to import HaaS on ships. We found that negative physical rewards are effective solutions.

We rebuilt slavery.

STONKS ONLY GO UP! /s

Our Startup uses mini human brains inside of biological bipedal systems to provide frontier performance in our custom internal benchmarks. /s

Explain the joke: We rebuilt humanity with a smaller brain.

Only if they make the brains much smaller.

Sprinkle a little cocaine right on the grey matter to overclock the device.

Warhammer? This sounds not far from the most horrific mission from a Shadowrun campaign I ran. They were making the new internet out of human brains.

“In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time,” he said.

That doesn’t mean you should do it for real.

Or Thought Emporium (he plans to grow tiny nerve cells to play doom)

No shit. Well the Imperium is fascist.