It's not impossible. With current levels of augmented reality technology... well, in my city, at least— it'd be perfectly capable of putting someone through a hyper-realistic simulation by stimulating certain nerve receptors in the brain to enable a non-corporeal body to feel anything from pain to hunger. Really, the human mind is the simplest thing to trick in this regard, and for anything distinctly non-humanoid—like, say, a robot or an AI—it would just be a matter of uploading and tweaking their existing coding once in the simulation.

( ..........okay, that was a lot. angela slowly sips her drink. )

But that's extremely costly, especially depending on their goals. Some corporations prefer just to clone a person a million times and let them all fight to the death for weeks at a time until the strongest emerges rather than running a simple simulation to figure that out. ( it's like, one of the top ten worst things she's learned about the city. ) "Efficient" and "inexpensive" tend to be the highest priorities for companies seeking to capitalize on their projects.