Fun fact: The human battery thing is actually a retcon the Wazowskis did at the last moment because they thought the American public would be too stupid to grok the actual understanding of the Matrix.
Humans are an entropic species, they consume more energy than they produce - any synthetic race that tried to harness energy from a net negative energy producer is an idiot.
What the Matrix is, is actually a distributed simulation MATRIX that uses individual human brains as nodes in a shared, hallucinogenic dream, indistinguishable from reality.
The real simulation isn’t so primitive, it doesn’t require people to be popsicle tubes in some crazy dystopian cyberpunk black and red tower attended by insectoid robots.
Instead the entire universe is contained on a single state machine, compromising a [redacted] amount of memory, running in [redacted]. Simulants are never aware of being inside of the simulation, except for rare instances where outsiders occasionally post on Lemmy.
Why they do that, we don’t know. We suspect that it is [all further content redacted].
Semi-Hemi-Demigod