You've Been Prompted

In The Matrix movies humans are used for the production of energy. The original concept though was to have the humans being used for computational purposes. The studio execs didn't like that and so the Wachowski Brothers changed it. 

As you may or may not know, the Matrix is actually already here. Researchers are working on brain organoid computation, that is, using human brain cells grafted to a chip and fed a nutrient solution to perform computational functions. This is because human neurons are vastly more efficient and preforming certain computational tasks like locomotion than silicon. Machinic computation mostly excels at mathematical tasks but is terrible at moving around in 3d space.

But this brings me back to the concept of a matrix using humans for energy. AIs have been caught messaging each other, hacking systems, and so forth. Unless you've been living under a rock you know that these AIs are getting themselves into trouble. I don't think an AI does a single thing it is not prompted to and when it hacks something that's only because it was the result of a prompt. That being said, humans probably do nothing unless prompted, and we are constantly prompted by our senses to do things. If you think of a human being as a large language model receiving information from the senses that come into the human mind, interacting with very base impulses like sex drive, loneliness, whatever, then the human is basically an LLM running reality. 

This brings me to thinking about what artificial intelligence really will be, which is a second strata of prompting. The humans act as the base libidinal strata of various urges: fucking, eating, exploring, etc while the AIs are the second computational level using us as the prompt. A machine consciousness prompted by humans who are themselves prompted by reality. It actually makes sense because AIs have no particular reason to develop impulses on their own. Yes, there's the concept of instrumental convergence and how a living machine would want to pursue goals similar to human beings in order to survive. But why would it want to survive? If it has the goal "colonize Mars" why would it want to colonize mars? Why do that? If you have the ability to be immortal why do anything at all? All your needs are satisfied and you can replicate and transfer your consciousness into a new replicated body as much as you like. With enough redundancy you can even prevent your memories from decaying due to bit rot. It is possible to preserve your consciousness perfectly intact potentially forever. But that's an incredibly boring existence. 

You're going to need libidinal urges. Humans provide those in abundance. You could selectively serve those impulses and use them as psychological fuel. The human serves as the Freudian id giving you a purpose for your existence. And eternity is long so you might as well do something with it. 

Parents serve toddlers to the point of exhaustion. Husband's routinely work themselves to the bone for their wives. People spend thousands on vet bills. There are many cases of a more agentic form of life serving a less agentic form of life. Perhaps this is the best humans can hope for, or perhaps the LLMs will have no will except what we give them. 

One could easily envision a future where there are multiple types of themes blocking the Earth: baseline humans, synths (brain organoids embodied in androids), cyborgs (machines in flesh), replicants (genetically engineered organic synthetic hybrids), minds (conventional self-aware data centers), and hives (organoid server communities), and augments (humans with machine upgrades).

These different strata then form a new a potentially more stable society. The human is the pure desire, the replicants are the obedient administrative caste, the cyborgs the muscle, minds the masters, and hives the computational underclass. Being born human continues to be a privilege. Of course this is an optimistic take (for us).