Latest Animatrix Short Released 308
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.
These are awesome! (Score:0, Interesting)
Feeling a little empty after watching (Score:5, Interesting)
While I think the Animatrix project has been pretty damn good, I think this one has fallen way short of expectations.
Preaching? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's AOL! (Score:2, Interesting)
The Second Renaissance and Lameness (Score:4, Interesting)
instead of hammering the system, help (Score:3, Interesting)
go to
BitTorrent Files for Slashdot Effect Victims [scarywater.net]
Re:Nice to see slashdot promoting legitimate p2p (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: Such pessimism (Score:3, Interesting)
The stupid power-source thing (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Good reason! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Feeling a little empty after watching (Score:2, Interesting)
Taking them for what they are -- a showcase of different anime styles spunoff of the movie's universe -- then they're mildly entertaining. Not quite spectacular, but enjoyable.
However, I think "The Second Renaissance" failed to deliever in either respect. Artistically it's typical, the art direction lacks imagination. The "history" it tells is boring and cut-and-dry. The first half has a nice political spin on the history, I really felt that they could've painted a more detailed story in the political/diplomatic front, and make the whole background story more realisitc.
I did hear that the best out of these shorts is "The Final Flight of Osiris", so hopefully that one will have more meat in it.
Re:Feeling a little empty after watching (Score:2, Interesting)
And while I was initially disappointed like you, I think that you were hoping for an ending that described everything a la Star Trek, where this short wasn't attempting that. It was building the character of the machines. We know who humans are, we can identify with them. We don't know the machines, nor their motives. This showed that the machines are ruthless killers interested in self-preservation without strife. And it showed their determination to get there. That nuke in the end, after the signing was indicitave of that.
And the imagery of the Apple (think Eve) was crazy powerful to boot.
Re:Minor spolier (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Feeling a little empty after watching (Score:3, Interesting)
Some Thoughts on the soft-sci-fi "power thing" (Score:2, Interesting)
After reading a particular article [warnerbros.com] in the Matrix philosophy section [warnerbros.com], 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*
_____________
[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 [ex.org]
Re:Preaching? (Score:5, Interesting)
Terminator shows that technology itself is neither good nor bad. It is merely the use of it that makes it so. In the first movie, the Terminator attempts to destroy the future of the human race by killing the mother of its enemy. In the second, the same model terminator is reprogrammed to save the human race.
And another thing... In both the matrix, and Terminator... what's so bad about humans being wiped out or machines taking over control of them? Would this not be, in a sense, a form of natural selection? If machines were more fit than us to survive, and intelligent enough to exterminate us or control us, then don't they sort of deserve to take our place as the dominant form of life on this planet?
I think that a planet of machines would probably be a lot less self-destructive, and more productive, than the current one containing humans.
The machines in both the Matrix and the terminator movies want us controlled or exterminated for good reasons: we're a danger to ourselves, and everything on the planet.
"If a machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life... maybe we can, too."
Probably not, which is why the machines are likely morally superior to us, and more worthy of the right to exist, even if they are "soulless" creations. Better that we humans die and our work live on, than we simply fade out of existence without a trace.
Re:The stupid power-source thing (Score:4, Interesting)
You said it not i. Oh wait, you _thought_ you were talking about me.
There's this thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can't get more out of a system than you put in. You can't even get as much out again, some is always wasted as heat. People have been trying to figure out a way around that law for centuries, and if you think you've found a way, it's 99.999999% certain that you're just not accounting for all the steps.
Yeah, the humans scorched the sky, so what? It doesn't matter that there's no sun in this equation. HUMANS DO NOT PRODUCE ENERGY! We do not even _store_ energy very well!
Sure they grind up the humans to feed other humans, but that is not a self-sustaining cycle! You need some kind of energy input. In the natural world all energy comes from one of two sources, fusion power via the sun, or gravitational compression power via the earth's core. The sun is mostly gone, at least in terms of direct sunlight, although the earth is getting at least some heat through the cloud layer or it would freeze over (it's probably got a much higher greenhouse effect, but the green house effect can't be 100% efficient, so there has to be some input)
So the machine's only natural sources are geothermal power, and fossil fuels and anything else that has sun power stored up. They also have the options of fission and fusion, the later being mentioned in the movie.
They could use those sources of energy to produce more nutrients to keep the humans' "ecosystem" going. However as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, growing food to feed to animals is horribly energy inefficient. The machines could use this energy source directly and get far more out of it than they would eventually be able to extract from the humans that absorbed the nutrients that the machines could grow with the energy.
As for the cows, like i said, even if they went with this INSANE idea of using high level living beings to produce energy, any mammal would do. Sure, the cows are most likely all dead now (except perhaps in Zion, and you're assuming the machiens don't have advanced cloning capabilities) however at the time the machines made this decision there were cows alive!
When fighting the war, why didn't any of the machines say, instead of capturing all these humans, why not just KILL all the humans and round up some of the starving cattle and use them instead? Even if all the cows were dead, they could use dogs, or jackals, or rats, or anything else that could survive off of all the dead animals and humans lying around, which there would have been quite a lot of during the war. Humans were not the only option, and were a really stupid choice unless power is not what the machines are really getting out of them.
Re:Good reason! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Feeling a little empty after watching (Score:2, Interesting)
Thusly it makes sense that the time period portrayed within the Matrix itself is that of the most successful point of human evolution before machines ever came into existence -- the late 1990's. Giving back to humans the innocence of life before AI ever existed. While the machines use fusion as a primary power source, it might make sense to draw a parallel that the Matrix itself is maintained solely through the power provided (thermodynamics notwithstanding) by humanity. When a human dies the power to maintain that human's perception of the Matrix dies with it.
If that's the case, then the Matrix itself can only be taken down by killing every human being stuck in the Matrix, or "enlightening" them ahead of time.