| "…LLMs only exist in the virtual world, whereas we're interacting with a world that's richer and has much more to offer." I have a gamer friend that believes, having played 100's of 1st-person games, that he has had rich experiences because of it. I reflect back on a day my family and I set out to hike through Arches National Park (still a Monument at the time, I believe) and the heat was such that my oldest daughter seemed in danger of going into runaway heat exhaustion. I began to panic as we were so far along on the hike already that even returning to where we parked seemed to pose danger for her. There was little to no "coverage" (shade) along the trail and the heat and sun were intense that day—we had passed almost nothing. Finding the smallest of bushes to provide minimal shade for her, I scouted ahead on the trail to look for some kind of larger area where there would be enough shade, perhaps a breeze even, to allow her to bring her core body temperature back down. Fortunately I found just that. (And it turned out that, in the news later, two hikers within a few hundred miles of us had in fact died that day as it was a record heat wave for the area.) I think somehow that me and my daughters experiences that day, when actual death was perhaps on the table, was something a "virtual environment" can never really offer. |