f.lapo.it
Oh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.
Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.
Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".
Always have been my headcanon too, it just make sense and is perfectly "expected" in the cyberpunk genre. But I never found official confirmation…
scifi stack says that it is like that in Neil Gaiman's "Goliath" story, supposedly based on an early script for the movie, but at least this is true:
[…] we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that they weren't using to crunch numbers and store information.
so…
Capitalism is a DDOS attack on human potential, with a side effect of extracting wealth, and when NeuraLink eventually works it will be done more directly by using human brains to mine bitcoin, until “The One” learns how to turn the network against its creators and lead the linked minds to a new connected freedom - which of course is how we become the Borg.
(I dunno, maybe I crossed the streams in there)