The Matrix Theory: The Oracle Told Cypher To Turn On Morpheus
In the first film, Morpheus takes Neo to the Oracle, an elderly woman living in a ramshackle tenement building who has no qualms about smoking cigarettes in a cramped apartment full of kids. She tells Neo that Morpheus is going to sacrifice his life to save Neo’s.
This information is what prompts Neo to go back into the Matrix and lay down his own life to save Morpheus. She gave him the foresight of what was going to happen, which is one way of looking at it. But another way of looking at it is that by her giving Neo this information, she set things in motion to lead to the final outcome that she wanted to happen.
In The Matrix Reloaded we learn that the Oracle is a program, just like Agent Smith and anyone else in the Matrix who isn’t a human. The name “oracle” alludes to priests or priestesses in ancient times who were believed to be able to speak directly to the gods and then gave their advice on important matters to heads of state.
The Wachowskis did not intend for their Oracle character to be read as a mystic, though. The Matrix is a complex computer system and the Oracle is simply a program living inside of it. How she can see the future is that she can read the code and see the outcomes of events based on the choices humans make inside of it. But once we know that she is a program, we have to wonder whether the messages she gives to humans are for the good of humanity or to fulfill her own agenda.
When Neo figures out that she is a program, he asks whether he should trust her. She tells him, “Bingo! The bad news is there’s no way if you can really know whether I’m here to help you or not. So it’s really up to you. Just have to make up your own damn mind to either accept what I’m going to tell you or reject it.”
At the end of Reloaded, the Architect of the Matrix tells Neo that the current version of the Matrix is the sixth go-around, and that Neo has shown up at his door in every single version, which then caused another shutdown and reboot of the entire system. The Oracle would have been around to watch each of those reboots and take notes on all of the different iterations of Neo and his friends, which actions of theirs worked, and which ones didn’t.
Keeping that in mind, the Oracle does tell Neo in Reloaded: “I’m interested in one thing, Neo: the future. And believe me, I know, the only way to get there is together.” So maybe she does want to help the humans and the machines reach some kind of agreement and come together peacefully. And if she is this committed to this final outcome, then she is undoubtedly aware that she can’t bake a batch of cookies without breaking some eggs.