Simulated Experience vs. Real Experience
Why Palmer Luckey is Incorrect
The idea for this post came from this tweet:
For context, I don’t personally dislike Palmer Luckey, but I do have a problem with this take. I also think there is something substantial to say about this general topic.
Essentially what he is saying is, “If AI takes all of the jobs, we’ll be free to do things like this University of Tokyo study.”
If we take this study in a vacuum, it is pretty cool feat. Being able to do something like that is great. However, once you place it in the context of a world where you are doing things like this because there is nothing else to do, all of the luster of the experience disappears. Now, you are not pushing the limits of adventure or lived knowledge, but, “filling time.”
I think that the core of my problem with his tweet is the dichotomy of a Real Experience versus a Simulated Experience. In an AI dominated world where people are milling about and, “burning time,” we are no longer engaging in any sort of real experience. Mostly, our real experiences would be confined to human-human interactions, and even those interactions could be infiltrated by AI in some ways1. However, almost all of our experiences outside of those would be simulated. If AI is accomplishing everything for us, then our participation in almost anything is superfluous. Even in the context of this boat study, who is to say that if AI is that powerful, that it would not be powerful enough to run a billion simulations to prove the same point.
I’m not going to say that there is no point in proving that you can do something yourself, but the experience itself becomes diminished when it is assumed that it is non-essential or has already been done before. In aviation, simulators are used to simulate real emergency scenarios so that they can be more effectively handled if encountered in the real world. If you mess up in the simulator, there are no real consequences, other than you might have to run the simulation again. If you mess it up in the real world, you and likely dozens of other people, die.
If I’m making up artificial feats for myself because I have nothing else left to do, I am just deluding myself into thinking that I am doing something. My life is utterly inconsequential. The reality is that most people in this kind of world will not seek to push themselves because there are no consequences for not doing so. Most likely, they will debase themselves with a life of sloth and debauchery because frankly, that might be more of a real experience than LARPing in a boat. Losing $10,000 on a gambling bet will probably still feel relatively real compared to teaching yourself quantum physics so that you can prove something AI already proved.
The best that we can hope in this scenario is that people become so degenerated that the AI breaks and people are forced to engage in a reality with consequences again.
Thankfully, I don’t think that kind of AI future is anywhere close to being realized. But, people shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that this kind of future is anything other than a version of Hell on Earth.
You could imagine scenarios where AI, “matches,” people to meet up, stripping the meeting of its organic serendipity. You could also have people using wearable electronics where AI is guiding their responses.