Apart from its rhetorical value, the allegory is interesting because of it raises questions concerning life-as-suffering and painful knowledge/blissful ignorance. The Matrix does a decent job of relaying both of those concepts to a mass audience.
Personally, I'm not certain that humans can create a meaningful utopia. Empirically, we seem to be very bad at personally gauging our absolute welfares[1].
[1]: http://faculty.som.yale.edu/ShaneFrederick/HedonicTreadmill....
The Hedonic Treadmill for me gets about the same treatment as Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs - it's too simplistic and the conclusions it makes are biased by the beliefs of the culture it originated in. It's fairly easy to find many questions to ask and many holes to poke. A lot of "happiness" studies sadly tend to tap directly into cultural norms and expectations and are very difficult to untangle. Including the cultural norm of giving "happiness" a high value, higher than the painful knowledge you mention, for instance. One objective I would have for a utopia is that knowledge would cease to be painful. Until then, it's a lie either way, and a true utopia is not a lie.
Not to mention, if the Hedonic Treadmill is true, it's highly likely to be genetic, which is should not be an obstacle give or take a few centuries.
I would recommend against throwing out the utopian idea based on social science theories. The Hedonic Treadmill is maybe 40 years old, utopias are probably many k years in the future.
How exactly is this laughable? it is generally true as shown by the predator-prey cycle - a form of balance. The exception to this cycle is usually invasive species that do not have a natural predator, these populations grow until they exhaust their food source and the population collapses.
Also by the predator-prey cycle argument, humans just haven't reached the balance yet. We have an abundance of food currently, so we are still growing to the balance point.
> But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.
Actually, nature had a patent on that one long before humans showed up. It's the author of that "primitive cerebrum", too. We've been spending the past however many thousands of years to try undo this reality. But we're really new to this party.
These AI's also sound awfully like humans. And they're motivated to create lots of humans (regardless of happiness of thereof) and collect them as batteries. Surely we should trust these ones to create a best world for us, and they have no reason to lie to us. I'm sure people resisted this in the Matrix because they disliked happy worlds. Not, you know, because having your entire reality be controlled by some other entity is worrying.