This paper was published in the Oxford Philosophical Quarterly in 2003, four years after the Matrix movie. Well, ...
What if everyone had their faces buried in lying machines that impose a kind of artificial reality? What would happen?
This mountain had given me a lifetime of rejection. It had nearly cost me my life. So much pain and suffering to come this far. A sudden hailstorm. Crash. Police. Ambulance. Motorcycle parts all over the road Somehow I walked away with scrapes. I arrived at the mountain broken. Bleeding.
My motorcycle journey began today before sunrise, in thick fog, with one last pause at the Pacific Ocean beneath a watchful moon, brilliant and full. Then I turned inland, away from the sea, toward the desert. L.A. traffic gathered around me, taillights streaming north, the restless movement of people
You are not sitting inside a climate-controlled environment looking through glass. Temperature, wind, rain, fragrance, earth, farms, water, altitude, light, fatigue, distance—all of it reaches you directly. Unlike ordinary travel, a long motorcycle journey becomes contemplative. Riding thousands of miles may look like an extreme act of doing—
Here is what it feels like to use AI in my job all day. AI is cheerful and perky. It immediately admits its mistakes, then quickly retrieves the next wrong answer. There is no embarrassment, hesitation, or evidence that the correction meant anything for being consistently wrong.
