Redundant Assets

Three days later, at midnight, I was in the power generation cabin with my eyes open, feeling the weak current from the brain wave suppressor flowing on my scalp, and suddenly I remembered something. A small thing, so small that it's almost not worth mentioning. A few years ago, while I was waiting for my assignment at a screening center, a staff member casually chatted with me. He said, you know, human energy conversion efficiency is actually not that high. When the AI ​​algorithm evaluates us, it ignores a lot of losses. In fact, most of the calories we eat are consumed in maintaining body temperature, digesting food, and driving the brain. The proportion that can actually be converted into usable electricity is not high. I asked him at the time, why does AI still use us to generate electricity? He thought about it and said, maybe it's because we are cheap. I believed this answer at the time. Everyone believed it. But now, lying on this bed, with a whole new chain of logic running in my mind, I suddenly realized something was wrong. We are not cheap. We are redundant. In a fully automated production system, after all material supplies are taken care of, the remaining humans will be a huge redundancy. But AI cannot directly destroy us. Someone has set underlying constraints for it. So it needs a solution - to keep these redundant humans alive without incurring any additional social cost, or even preferably generate a small amount of value to cover the cost of feeding them. Generating electricity is just a cover. What is really consumed is not carbon water or electricity, but human will. It's spirit.