If you’re worried that technology is getting a little too smart and robots are ready to take over the world, I know a quick and easy way to allay those fears: Call a company and try to ask them a simple question. You will be connected to an automated sound system and spend the next 10 minutes saying NO, I DID NOT SAY THAT! You will spend your time shouting. WHAT DO YOU MEAN NOT ‘YOU DID NOT CAPTURE THIS COMPLETELY’? I DON’T WANT ANY OF THESE OPTIONS! CONNECT ME TO A HUMAN, dammit!
This was definitely my experience calling Apple and trying to reconfirm my Vision Pro demo that was suddenly canceled due to snow. But if my phone experience felt ancient, the Apple Vision Pro headset itself felt like a surprising glimpse into the future. As it should be: this thing costs $3,499.
My expectations, I’ll admit, were pretty low. For the last decade or so we have been told that virtual reality and augmented reality were just around the corner, but they have consistently failed to break into the mainstream. The headphones were bulky and cumbersome, the prices were steep, and the experience itself was impressive but not exactly awe-inspiring. Metadata (the rebranding of virtual reality) has been similarly disappointing.
But the Vision Pro was truly impressive. I felt like Usher, I kept saying “woah” so much throughout the demo. The Vision Pro is branded as “spatial computing” rather than an entertainment device, and is designed to be used for everything from answering emails to surfing the web; you wander with your eyes and scroll by pinching your fingers and moving your hands as you do. I conduct an invisible orchestra.
Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect is immersive video. Everything else feels like a bit of a gimmick: Do I want to see my computer applications floating in front of me? Not exactly! However, when you watch a movie, you feel like you are transported into the content. If money were no object, I would immediately grab a pair of headphones because watching movies is so much fun.
And that’s the extent of Vision Pro’s market right now: people for whom money is no object. The headset is impressive, but still not exactly comfortable (and good luck drinking coffee while wearing it) and not to the point where it justifies the price tag. We’re still in the early stages of this technology, and it will take some time for it to gain steam in the broader culture.
But while it’s hard to say when spatial computing will become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today, it’s clearly a matter of when widespread adoption will occur. There is no debate that we are moving towards a world where “real life” and digital technology are seamlessly blurred. The internet is moving off our screens and into the world around us. This raises serious questions about how we perceive the world and what we think reality is. Big tech companies are desperate to rush this technology, but it’s unclear how worried they are about the consequences.
Some of these consequences are easy to predict. Give it a few weeks and we’ll probably hear about a car accident caused by someone using headphones while driving. There are already plenty of videos showing people using Vision Pro while out and about, including in their cars. (Meanwhile, Apple tells people not to use the headset while driving, but hasn’t added any guardrails to stop the technology from being used by someone behind the wheel.)
It also seems depressingly inevitable that, without some kind of radical intervention, these headphones will soon take online harassment to another level entirely. Over the years, there have been numerous reports in the metadata of people being harassed or even “raped”: an experience that feels frighteningly real due to how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between real life and the digital world blur to the point of being almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between an online attack and a real-life attack?
More broadly, the question of how spatial computation will change what we accept as reality is also terrifying. Researchers from Stanford and the University of Michigan recently conducted a study on Vision Pro and other “pass-through” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature that brings VR content into your real-world environment, allowing you to see what’s happening around you while using the device) and how this technology could rewire our brains. and has emerged with some stern warnings about how it “can interfere with social connection.”
These headphones essentially give us our entire private world and rewrite the idea of shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can organize your environment; For example, you can walk to the shops wearing this camera and it will erase all the homeless people from your field of view and make the sky brighter.
“What we’re about to experience is that using these headsets in public places, common ground disappears,” Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at Stanford and one of the study’s principal investigators, recently told Business Insider. “People will be in the same physical location and experience visually different versions of the world simultaneously. “We will lose common ground.”
What’s scary isn’t just the fact that our perception of reality could change: it’s the fact that so few companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Consider how much influence big tech already has when it comes to the content we see, and then multiply that by a million. Think deepfakes are scary? Wait until it looks more realistic.
We are seeing the global rise of authoritarianism. This kind of technology will greatly accelerate it if we’re not careful. Being able to draw people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they view reality? This is an authoritarian’s dream. We are entering an age where people can be softened and manipulated like never before. Forget Mussolini’s bread and circuses, budding fascists now have buns and Vision Pros.