It should be remembered that most aspects of culture developed because they have a purpose. In the case of cooking and eating good food, there are definitely practical benefits, largely psychological.
One part of it is about directing attention. If you cook for yourself, you pay more attention to what you're putting into your body, and in learning how different flavors come together you learn intuitions about taste and aesthetics. In directing your attention like this, cooking can also serve as a kind of meditation / mindfulness practice.
In knowing how to cook, you become able to cook for others, which is a very common way for people to connect. If a loved one is sick, making soup for them can make them feel loved and cared for, just as it can make you feel good about putting in effort to help them feel better; especially when it comes to things that you just have to wait out, like flu, something like this is an excellent way of maintaining a connection. Conversely, in knowing how much effort it takes to make a good meal you become more appreciative of meals others make for you.
And finally, in cooking with someone else you learn about them and about yourself, about subtle differences that you might not have encountered otherwise. In solving a relatively easy, low-stakes problem together, you gain a sense of closeness without much risk or cost.
Overall, cooking is a practice centered on ideas that are underappreciated by people too engrossed in "hustle culture" etc, so it's important to have it as a tool in today's world. Of course, everything that it provides can be found elsewhere, but these are the reasons it's so deeply ingrained in human culture. I think you would also struggle to find other things that give you all of the above, and more that I didn't go into, for so little investment. It's not that cooking makes you human or something, but cooking does help you to connect with a lot of the deeper parts of yourself that do.
> Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.
I dont think an agent fighting in a video game really counts? There is quite a significant gap between an FPS and a missile launcher, and it would be a waste not to explore how these agents learn in FPS environments.
I think there's an inherent problem in the way we perceive AI bias. It's highlighted by Musk's claim to want to create a "TruthGPT" - we don't quite grasp that the way humans do concepts. When it comes to human thinking, "Truth" isn't really a thing.
Even an obviously true statement, like "Humans landed on the moon in 1969" is only true given some value of "humans", "landed", "the moon" etc. Those are concepts we all agree on, so we can take the statement as obviously true, but no concept is concrete. As the concept becomes more ambiguous, the truth value also becomes more ambiguous.
"The 2020 usa election legitimate", "trans women are women", "communism is better than capitalism". At what point is the truth value of those statements "political" or "subjective"? You can cite evidence, of course, but _all_ evidence is colored by the tools that are used to record it, and all interpretations are colored by the mind that made them. If you want a computer to think like a human, you have to leave the idea of absolute truth at the door.
Projects like this try to get around the fundamental flaw in GPTs - namely that they do not have goals, plans, thought processes etc - without actually solving it, e.g. by having the AI write out its "goals" before continuing.
But this is a hacky fix, and will never be reliable enough for consistent use. For that, more actual research is necessary, on how to simulate and model goals and trains of thought and have them interface with the world model provided by an LLM.
One part of it is about directing attention. If you cook for yourself, you pay more attention to what you're putting into your body, and in learning how different flavors come together you learn intuitions about taste and aesthetics. In directing your attention like this, cooking can also serve as a kind of meditation / mindfulness practice.
In knowing how to cook, you become able to cook for others, which is a very common way for people to connect. If a loved one is sick, making soup for them can make them feel loved and cared for, just as it can make you feel good about putting in effort to help them feel better; especially when it comes to things that you just have to wait out, like flu, something like this is an excellent way of maintaining a connection. Conversely, in knowing how much effort it takes to make a good meal you become more appreciative of meals others make for you.
And finally, in cooking with someone else you learn about them and about yourself, about subtle differences that you might not have encountered otherwise. In solving a relatively easy, low-stakes problem together, you gain a sense of closeness without much risk or cost.
Overall, cooking is a practice centered on ideas that are underappreciated by people too engrossed in "hustle culture" etc, so it's important to have it as a tool in today's world. Of course, everything that it provides can be found elsewhere, but these are the reasons it's so deeply ingrained in human culture. I think you would also struggle to find other things that give you all of the above, and more that I didn't go into, for so little investment. It's not that cooking makes you human or something, but cooking does help you to connect with a lot of the deeper parts of yourself that do.