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The first thing we must clarify is that the Machines didn't invent the Matrix technology. We know this because in the Animatrix short "Matriculated," set during the Machine War, a group of rebels already have plugs to jack into the virtual world. In "The Second Renaissance," after all of humanity's armies are defeated, the Machines start to install machinery inside human survivors through forced surgery to begin the Matrix.

But the technology is far older. Arthur, from Inception, explains, "The military developed dream sharing -- a training program where soldiers could strangle, stab, and shoot each other, then wake up." So its original purpose was training, pretty much like this:

Warner Bros.

"Yo, is your chair sticky?"

"The kid ran the Woman In Red program before us."

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War brings technological advancement, so to make the PASIV device more efficient, it is upgraded to be installed inside people. It makes the dreams more stable and allows remote access to dreams instead of giving someone a roofie.

On the downside, if you die in the dream world, you die in real life. This is actually beneficial to the Machines, because when the agents shoot a rebel, they'll die for good. It's somewhat the Matrix version of a planned obsolescence.

Despite being more advanced, the Matrix technology still shares the premise of Inception's Mark I, because someone had to construct the Matrix world for dreamers to live in. That's explicitly said when Inception's Ariadne asks how architects got involved, and Cobb answers that someone had to design the dreams. That's because ...