As fun a flick as the original Matrix movie was, I found the ‘human batteries’ explanation Morpheus gave Neo less than convincing.
The current rash of AI creations rely on a huge input of data to make their ‘magical’ connections, and it’s now being realised that input recycled from an AI causes their worldviews to collapse into random chaos. (garbage in → garbage out)
So, a more plausible explanation is that the Matrix needs a readily accessible scrape farm.
This is partially observed by what happens to Agent Smith when it unplugs (it metastasises into endless copies of itself)
I’ve seen several pieces pointing out that the laws of thermodynamics make the idea of harvesting energy from humans pretty illogical.
I’m no Matrix scholar, but I wonder if your suggestion that humans serve as a scrapeable data source might have some twisty analogue in the The Architect’s explanation that the matrix couldn’t be made “perfect” with humans in the mix, and had to account for human imperfections.
They might need humans as a ‘Tenth Man’ to imagine/consider things they cannot. The seed of this is in the movie itself when Neo prepares to go back into the Matrix to rescue Morpheus, and starts by ordering up a ridiculously vast armory:
(paraphrasing from memory)
Trinity: Neo, no one has ever done this before.
Neo: I know. That’s why it’s going to work.
Ooo, that reminds me of the anime series PSYCHO-PASS – in which citizens are continuously surveiled and psychologically profiled by a governing AI.
CATASTROPHICALLY RUINOUS SPOILER: (Seriously, the series is so good – don’t spoil it!)
Later in the series, the governing AI is revealed to rely on a hive-mind of hundreds of disembodied brains that could not be scanned by the system, and whose capacity for objective and/or unconventional thinking is the key to its effectiveness.