Examples:

- Before going on a trip, pre-visiting the destination in Google Earth with VR is very spatially informative & makes directional intuition memorable upon arrival at the real world destination.

- Virtual role-play with environmental cues that cause make-believe to be ever more real.

But most people don't need this very often. Picking up a book or throwing on some earbuds to listen to a book are far more frequent and compatible with simultaneous other activities. VR feels the same--a high-demand focused experience that is infrequently worth the effort.

To you. I find the debate quite valuable, as there is a wide open future and we're in the midst of figuring out where "here" is.

/me up and continues search for good people and good projects.

Maybe it's like the transformation of local-to-global that traveling musicians felt in the early 1900s: now what they do can be experienced for free, over the radio waves, by anyone with a radio.

YouTube showed us that video needn't be produced only by those with $10M+ budgets. But we still appreciate Hollywood.

There are new possibilities in this transformation, where we need to adapt. But there are also existing constraints that don't just disappear.

To me, the "Why" is that people want positive experiences. If the only way to get them is to pay experts, then they will. But if they have alternatives, that's fine too.

This differs from closed-form calculations where a calculator is normally constrained to operate--there is one correct answer. In other words "a random calculation mistake" would be undesirable in a domain of functions (same input yields same output), but would be acceptable and even desirable in a domain of uncertainty.

We are surprised and delighted that LLMs can produce code, but they are more akin to natural language outputs than code outputs--and we're disappointed when they create syntax errors, or worse, intention errors.

I'd start with changing what and how we measure. A move away from single-dimension variables like GDP and simplistic closed-form calculations like the Black-Scholes formula and all it led us to believe.

If we agree simple-but-wrong metrics are bad, then we can (I believe) move towards simulations--not "my simulation" nor "your simulation", but ways to talk about beliefs and outcomes. I think the future will involve AI-assisted computable discussions, where multiple variables and the ability to dynamically incorporate or exclude assumptions from opposing perspectives will lead us to some shared agreement and mutually beneficial outcomes (while allowing for many areas where people will continue to disagree).

I'd propose next that we continue to raise the prominence of evidence showing how cooperation is often better than competition. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom spent her life identifying systems and methods of cooperation. She proposes, "We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies [e.g. of the commons] nor free of moral responsibility."

Robert Axelrod ran simulations on the iterated prisoner's dilemma and concluded, "forgiveness, cooperation, and reputation" are a stable strategy in most real-world conditions.

Strong ideologies that promote extreme individualism, marketed as scientifically sound, deserve great skepticism IMO, and should be treated with the same wariness as two missionaries knocking on your door.

I know this has been discussed at length in many places, but I just want to point out that it isn't binary. There is some kind of distribution where "sovereign ownership" (full protection, no taxes, no redistribution) would entice the most people to create wealth (and even then, I doubt it would be 100% of the population), all the way to "mob rule" where a minimal number of people would be enticed to create wealth (and I don't think it would be 0%). People do things for multidimensional reasons.

That said, our societies have tried many variations along the spectrum between these two extremes, and I think we have uncovered the importance of protecting wealth and the incentive to create it.

I love this, thank you for specifying the condition under which you might be convinced otherwise. I respect your position more for this. (And unfortunately as a Star Trek fanatic myself, agree with it so far as well).