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Latest Animatrix Short Released
martyn s writes "The latest animatrix short, The Second Renaissance, Part 2 is finally out. This short is the continuation of The Second Renaissance Part 1. Taken together, these shorts document how, in the matrix universe, 'Man was the architect of his own demise.'"
And here's the
BitTorrent link.
I love the idea of these shorts. Kudos to the license holders for doing these.
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
Just finished watching it, and I'm a smidge disappointed. I thought the first half set up an excellent backstory, but here, it's just "We attacked them, we lost, we're a power source," without any kind of expansion. It feels like this half just ended the story without trying to make any details beyond what we've gleaned from the first movie. Wasn't there a first Matrix that crashed and burned due to the people not able to accept it as reality? Was there any debate at all over how long the Dark Storm would last, unless they had some way to clear it afterwards? When did the AI develop the spidery robots?
While I think the Animatrix project has been pretty damn good, I think this one has fallen way short of expectations.
I dunno, man, I feel like I'm being preached to, again. Like:
Clean out the fridge before you eat something moldy which will make you sick.
Driving an SUV supports terrorism
Ordering french fries supports evil regimes which have WMD
If you don't pick up your room it'll lead to communist world domination.
Technology advances faster than our ability to manage it, eventually it will manage you if you don't watch out.
Some year, first the Matrix 2, then T3... What's the message here? Fear technology? Screw that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
mainly.... to start a revolution.
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I think these were the worst shorts of those that I've seen online and in the theaters. The plotline, while interesting, is overly simplistic with the nice, sweet, never-harming robots simply wanting their own state while the cruel, evil humans only want to enslave them. It glosses over issues such as the previous human occupiers of the new robot state, or human sympathizers (geeks?) and the real problems with granting sentient-status to the machines. I realize it's just a short, and that it's told from the perspective on another computer (the Zion archive...?), but I still felt that it was a (very) poor-man's Metropolis. If you did enjoy it, please pick up Metropolis and check it out, you'll probably love it.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
a bittorent site specifically for slashdot victims.
go to
BitTorrent Files for Slashdot Effect Victims
that illegal server happens to have .torrent files for DVD rip of the full animatrix
SF should not be taken literally, after all it's F for fiction. However, The Matrix has many interesting philosophical points and it's a lot more than just technofetishist action. It makes you think about things from different angles than what we're used to in our boring, 9 to 5 working lives. (and that's for the fortunate ones who have a job. *sigh*)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
That makes abolutly _no_ sense. Entropy makes it very unlikely that getting energy from people would be more efficient than converting the stuff they're using to feed the people directly into energy, especially given the "along with a kind of fusion" remark in the first movie. Even if that weren't true, _cows_ would be a much better source of energy, they're 100% herbivores and thus more efficient, and the machines wouldn't need to bother with the matrix at all for cows.
The only reasonable explanation is that Morpheus doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He assumes the people are being used as a power source because he's not up on his basic physics, in actuality the people are being used as processors for tasks that the human brain is well suited for but the machine style AI can't handle efficiently.
Unfortunatly with the Second Renaisance Part 2, we need to expand the circle of people who have no clue what they're talking about and include the archivist, or whatever the narator is, in the group.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
If I ran a website with over 700,000 daily technically-minded readers, I'd happily take cash from the bittorrent guys twho want to beef up their network with my drone army.
I'm a girl too! See naked chicks in my journal!
there is nothing the human mind could give the machines that they didn't have already
Hmmm, perhaps that's part of the story. I personally believe that a complicated enough machine could be built to essentially surpass us on every intellectual level, but there are many people who don't think a machine could ever have what we have: a soul. Given the religious undertones of the movie, this seems like a plausible suggestion... they are enslaving our souls.
Perhaps by using human brains, the machines can add an edge of unpredictability to their computations and simulations. Perhaps machines found that they would stagnate without incorporating whatever it was that humans possess.
If nothing else, very few other movies have spawned this much interest in existential philosophy in such a short period of time. There are so many essays out there based on the matrix, it's insane!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
After reading a particular article in the Matrix philosophy section, I've gotten a little less annoyed with the bio-electric power, because they put more emphasis on telling a story and seeding discussion. --although I still occasionally get knee-jerk desires to yell out, "OMG that's so BS," at the "bioelectric" energy plot-hole/saver(?). One possiblity: The machines, following the "essence of the second renaissance", chose to "bless all forms of intelligence" and preserve humanity for ethical[?] reasons and subsequently did something useful with the human "flesh" the machines had demanded from the people at the United Nations HQ(?) --sounds like a Computer Lifeform's Burden argued for by the human rights faction of the artificial intelligence collective =D[1]
Maybe he film producers are well aware that people don't generate power, but they're trying to show that people are always getting used for power today (politically) and in the future (elecrically [electronically]?) Human-brains-as-computing-source plot device wasn't used, emphasizing that the machines could do all the processing "needed", relegating humans to --exceedingly-- menial power generating duties, a form of role reversal showing how far man had fallen from their earlier thought-of-as superior position.
After all, having "long studied man's, simple, protein based based" bodies, the machines could have engineered blocks of cancer-like bioelectric flesh superior in most ways to the human-power-cells for their power duties because the blocks reproduce, come in adjustable shapes, and are very very unlikely to rebel [al la Neo] ;) ) But, they'd be boring, they'd kill the "save the enslaved masses" plot, and wouldn't be as ironic *heh*
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[1]All quotes occur near the section where a machine intelligence is meeting with human leaders in Second Renaissance Part 2 before the building blows up like Neo Tokyo in Akira