Comment by gabbagool
8 hours ago
Or, ask yourself the following question:
If you read every single book there is about The Grand Canyon, and watched every single video and/or documentary about The Grand Canyon, do you believe that you have fully experienced The Grand Canyon? Or do you just have to be there to fully experience it.
I dunno. Substitute in whatever you want for "The Grand Canyon". Maybe climbing Mount Everest or walking on the Moon. The point is that maybe the human experience is more vast than what is written about it.
In this context that isn't the right question.
Rather one should ask "Would you be able to answer any question and fulfill any request about the Grand Canyon given to you by others in a way that will be indistinguishable from someone who has been to the Grand Canyon"
This is setting up a contrast between long term memory and an LLM.
You might equally contrast someone who is physically in the Grand Canyon with an LLM given access to a drone with sensory attachments. I'd bet that if you told groups of humans and drone-controlling AIs to find something interesting, the humans would be more variable and cover a wider range of interesting discoveries but often just give up on the task, while the AI would be more likely to find something but would cluster around certain discoveries and make fewer overall.
What is the current ratio of opened to unopened cans of soda in the canyon, and how has that ratio developed over the last thirty days?
I'd be fantastically surprised if you could provide a precise answer to any such question without extensive security footage that doesn't exist.
An estimate, perhaps, but you probably couldn't even answer a simpler "how many people are currently in the canyon" without resorting to estimation given the lack of information currently available via the mentioned sources.
I suspect the same limitations apply to Grand Canyon visitors
I think I could get very close via video. But that depends on a lot of my non-canyon experience moving around the world, and LLMs are very flawed in their ability to input video, so I think they would not get nearly as close.
I've been to a few natural wonders (including the Grand Canyon) that I saw in advance on video. At least for me it isn't close at all. Even if audiovisual elements could be near-perfectly reproduced by video (imo not even close with modern tech, no screen is capturing the brilliance of sunlight), you aren't capturing the temperature, the feel of wind or rain, the smell of the plants around you, etc.
Well, I've never been to the Grand Canyon myself, but what you said perfectly aligns with my intuition.
Also, you touched on how even modern tech still falls short of the true experience. Just look at the history of motion picture since the early 1900s. We have added sound, color, bigger screens, faster refresh rates, more pixels, 3D (sort of), surround sound, spatial audio, IMAX, etc. Almost seems like video leaves a lot to be desired.
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But you already know those feelings from being outside elsewhere. You get a unique combination there, but that's only worth so much.
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The experience of every famous place I've visited after watching extensive video before hand, has been very different from what I imagined from the video.
No way. You get to the rim and only then you realize how huge it is. And then you still have to go down into the canyon.
The experience of vastness is mostly due to (high-res) stereoscopic vision. When you experience 6DOF VR in a fairly high-res world it definitely comes much, much closer to the awe one feels with the real experience.
It's similar in dismissing artificial audio based on listening to some pop song on a basic mobile speaker versus listening to well-designed binaural audio on good headphones. The latter can sound 'freakily' 'real'.