You seem to fail to realize who gave us the information about why humans were held in farms.AccursedTheory said:SkyNet reduced humanity to MILLIONs, instead of BILLIONS.
Like all AIs, it fails, but it is by far the most successful AI of all time (Besides the Matrix, but they were so stupid they thought human generated electricity was the most efficient energy sources available without a sun. Seriously?).
The "Humans are batteries" is just a theory made up by the humans as they saw how the robots kept humanity contained, the movies don't explain the motives of the machines at all.
In fact I read a blog posts somewhere about how the matrix timeline is extremely similar to a hypothethical sitation that may arise from Asimovs three laws. Basically it boils down to "The best way to "protect" humantiy is to take away our freedom because we would cause our own extinction eventually"