If everyone is in their own individual pod, how is there sexual reproduction? The Matrix would have to spend a great deal of time and energy making its occupants think that they are engaged in sexual intercourse, and are bearing children when by the narrative of the franchise that isn’t possible.
shareI presume that the Alien Overlords have a breeding program, one that involves huge vats of sperm and eggs. Gotta keep the generators running!
I think the humans are grown small, starting out as babies on the plants. They are likely doing it to introduce actual babies into the world. As people in the Matrix get pregnant, they provide the babies.
shareThis is actually a good point, that makes this movie and machines incredibly weird, when you think about it.
Wouldn't 'letting people decide' when to have be INCREDIBLY ineffective for GROWING them?
Like, think about how you grow a crop normally. You plant all the seeds, then they grow simultaneously, and you have a huge field full of crop, just like shown in this movie. But this kind of 'growing of people' in a steady-looking crop where everyone is about the same age wouldn't necessarily be possible (although when you look at the speed people keep breeding and overpopulating this planet, maybe it is effective after all)..
In any case, you'd think that MACHINES would just create as many babies as the crop needs, a PRE-DETERMINED AMOUNT, etc. But they just somehow let people decide who makes how many babies, where and when, and the machines have to play catch-up and constantly keep up with the locations and babies and skin colors and everything. Do they have to make the baby the same skin color in the real world, or can they just simply change skin colors digitally (after all, the people have no need to ever see their PHYSICAL body, so the digital projection can be any color the machines decide)?
Furthermore, why even create such diversity in people, colors, races, etc., THAT is certainly not effective. For machines, you'd think they'd create a standard mold, and make EVERYONE conform to that mold, and not even create two genders (why waste this much CPU power for a _BATTERY_?! Kind of self-defeating, if you USE your battery power just to create all this unnecessary crap for battery!)
As someone said, cows or other simple animals would make MUCH better batteries, they could make one uniform, optimal mold, and create every animals 100% the same, and then everything would be also predictable and easy to control. NO need for agents, etc..
If movies made sense, they wouldn't exist, I guess.. this movie would be completely different, if someone thought it through.
So, to start off: you're 100% right insofar as this system doesn't make sense. But I wouldn't be a grade-A geek if I didn't follow that up with...
Let's consider this:
The machines want X number of "batteries", based on their power grid projections. There are too potential problems here: 1) humans don't produce enough babies in the Matrix to "justify" the number of new-grown humans, and 2) humans are producing so many babies in the Matrix that the machines' crop production can't keep up.
1) Humans boink out new babies at an alarming rate. I don't think this would be a problem. But, if it were, a possible solution is that the machines just start adding twins and triplets into the virtual world. I'm not sure if they can manipulate DNA or not - probably can to some extent (now imagine a whole sub-section of the Machine world that insist on "Non-GMO batteries"), but either way, the residual self-images would likely conform. If they didn't, they'd just be non-identical twins.
2) If there are too many humans in-Matrix getting pregnant, the machines likely just sprinkle in some miscarriages.
Or, what if the machines know that humans produce more humans at exponentially-fast rates and so they don't need to worry so much about that (problem 2), and what if the human growth machines are actually synced up to the Matrix itself. Ie: two humans bang it out in virtual reality and a signal is sent to the crop plants to add a human with such-and-such a DNA sequence? Wild...
But we have more questions to solve...
Why have two genders and multiple skin tones? The same reason they can't make a Utopian existence. The human minds get suspicious if reality is too far warped, so the machines are forced to keep within certain parameters.
They can't just use cows because they needed to do something with the humans. They didn't want to kill them all, so they caught the first "batches" of batteries and plugged 'em in (plus, if humanity darkened the sky, they'd need that power source faster than the time it would take to start growing them, yes?)
But why not just kill them all?
This might be a much more interesting point: the Machines don't want to. They don't want to commit genocide. Maybe they know that would turn them into the kind of "virus" lifeform that the humans are - and they hate that. Maybe it's leftover AI code that humanity put into them and they can't get it out. Maybe something like Asimov's rules of robotics are in there, not so prevalent after centuries of upgrades and new operating systems, but still buried down there somewhere is the protocol, "Don't hurt the humans".
Maybe they don't want wipe Humanity out.
Maybe they *can't*.
I once watched a really fascinating clip of Christopher Hitchens talking about a scenario where Humanity was all-but-atheist: just one Christian remained. And, in the scenario, Hitchens said, he would have the opportunity to "convert" this last religious man. Hitch said he wouldn't do it. He didn't entirely know *why* he wouldn't, but he wouldn't do it. Maybe the Machines have something like that in their circuits...