i think this episode and Matrix got it wrong wrt. what humans would be used for. It isn't energy production. Given that humans have largest brain with largest brain/body ratio and with good energy efficiency the opening scene from Matrix looks to me like racks of GPUs running distributed computation/simulation.

In the spirit of this episode and the totalitarian nature of China today and the whole world tomorrow, i think it will be an every [regular] citizen duty to "plug in" for set amount of hours to run your fair share of social computing "dapps" and to sync-up/check the thoughts/emotions as well.

The open office enforced hive-style collaboration/teamwork and always-on IM with implicit contract of immediately dropping everything and lending your brain is a very-very early preview of that future.

>Given that humans have largest brain with largest brain/body ratio and with good energy efficiency the opening scene from Matrix looks to me like racks of GPUs running distributed computation/simulation.

That was what the Matrix was originally supposed to be - the humans were wired into a neural network to bootstrap the AIs, but executives were afraid moviegoers wouldn't be smart enough to understand that, so they forced the change to "batteries."

Humans-as-CPUs was the original plot of the Matrix IIRC, as pitched by the Wachowskis. The studio thought audiences would have a hard time understanding this, so they became D-cell batteries in the film instead.

Ahh, jinx!

I wonder - can't they remaster the movie? It wouldn't be an issue for modern audience given the cloud and Siri/Alexa becoming household notions.

Yeah humans are not very efficient at power conversion and I hate seeing this trope.

When The Matrix was first conceived, the machines used humans for some computing, but that was dumbed down a bit in the final product.

EDIT: ugh, double jinx

The Chinese social credit system has been around in some form for longer than Black Mirror. Black Mirror got the idea from THEM.

Source?

Planning of the system in its current form started in 2014: https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/plan...

The Black Mirror episode about a system like this came out in 2016.

I don't think they were using the bikes in that episode to power some great civilization or something, just to reduce costs and more importantly to keep everyone busy.

It wasn't clear what happened in the background, but it seemed like humanity was in a prison and to keep incidents down they made them do hard labor and provided endless mindless entertainment. Probably supposed to be an allegory for 9-5 jobs. The ending suggests that the rest of the planet is alive at least. Maybe humanity was put in prison for wrecking the biosphere and they're giving the planet time to recover?

Its a comic book..