The “Direct Brain-Machine Interface” document DARPA Defense Sciences Office Science and Technology Symposium 21-22 April 2004 mentions the term “Bio-Revolution” in the “Strategic Vision”. It was a word I’d never heard before, but figured it dealt with the interface of biology and artificial intelligence/computers. The deus ex machina of the modern age.
I Duck-Duck-Go-ed “biorevolution” and found this website: McKinsey and Company: The Bio Revolution. This 2020 article says: “It is now also possible to store the world’s wealth of data using DNA. The storage density of DNA is about one million times that of hard-disk storage.” Welcome to The Matrix.
In the movie, the human is used chiefly as an energy source. (But they were up-loadable—I’m thinking mainly of the first movie.) Connected to the machine that allows them to mentally enter the system of control, the human exists in a sleeping/comatose state. Maybe the producers and writers developed this idea in the later movies, reversing it into the human incorporating the machine. (I remember some odd sex scene in which the flesh was a fluidity we might have called “Magical Realism” in a more innocent, witching time.)
This real-life dystopia suggests that the main purpose of the human might not be energy, but storage capacity. Of course, DNA might refer to using plants or animals as bio-machine storage hybrids, but the human seems to be the more obvious end goal. Intellect.
I’m no scientist, but I am old enough to remember when it was possible to write science fiction. The lag between conception and production was long enough for a thought to develop and take form. For the fascination of a generation. The machina, necessary to the suspension of disbelief, was more fantasy than reality. But now the terrible gods, cold beings, efficient things, close the gap.
We are entering an age in which the flowering of our products becomes the subject of our worship. In love with marble, we will it into flesh.