If you’re ever worried that technology might be getting a little too intelligent and that robots are about to take over the world, I have a quick and easy way to put those fears to rest: call a company and try them to ask a simple question. You are connected to an automated voice system and spend the next 10 minutes shouting NO, I DIDN’T SAY THAT! WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘YOU HAVEN’T CATCHED THAT YET?’ I DON’T WANT ANY OF THOSE OPTIONS! CONNECT ME TO A HUMAN, GODDAMMIT!
That was certainly my experience when I called Apple and tried to reconfirm my Vision Pro demo, which had been abruptly canceled due to snow. But while my phone experience felt dated, the Apple Vision Pro headset itself felt like a surprising glimpse of the future. As it should be: the thing costs $3,499.
My expectations, I must admit, were quite low. For the past decade we’ve been told that virtual reality and augmented reality are just around the corner, but they have consistently failed to reach the mainstream. The headsets were clunky and impractical, the prices were sky-high, and the experience itself was impressive but not exactly awe-inspiring. The metaverse (a rebranding of virtual reality) was also disappointing.
However, the Vision Pro was really impressive. I felt like Usher, I kept saying “woah” so many times during the demo. Branded as ‘spatial computing’, rather than an entertainment device, the Vision Pro is intended to be used for everything from answering emails to surfing the web – you navigate with your eyes and scroll through your pinch your fingers and move your hands like you are conducting an invisible orchestra.
Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect of it is its immersive video. Everything else just feels a bit gimmicky: Do I want to see my computer apps floating in front of me? Not really! When you watch a movie, however, you feel like you’re transported into the content. If money were no object, I would immediately buy headphones, just because watching movies is so much fun.
And that’s basically the size of the market for the Vision Pro right now: people for whom money really isn’t an issue. The headset is impressive, but it’s still not exactly comfortable (and good luck drinking coffee while wearing it) and not to the point where it justifies the price tag. We are still in the early stages of this technology and it will take a while for it to gain traction in the broader culture.
But while it’s hard to say when spatial computing will become as ubiquitous as the smartphone is today, it’s clear that its widespread adoption is a matter of when, not if. There is no debate about the statement that we are moving towards a world in which ‘real life’ and digital technology merge seamlessly. The internet is disappearing from our screens to the world around us. And that raises serious questions about how we perceive the world and what we consider reality. Big tech companies are desperate for this technology, but it’s not clear how much they worry about the consequences.
Some of these consequences are easy to predict. Give it a few weeks and we’ll almost certainly hear about a car accident caused by someone using the headset while driving. There are already many videos circulating of people using the Vision Pro while on the road, including in their car. (Apple, by the way, tells people not to use the headset while driving, but hasn’t put in place any guardrails to prevent the technology from being used by anyone behind the wheel.)
It also seems depressingly inevitable that, without some form of radical intervention, these headsets will soon take online harassment to a whole other level. Over the years, there have been multiple reports of people being harassed and even “raped” in the metaverse: an experience that feels eerily real due to its immersive virtual reality. With the boundaries between real life and the digital world blurring to the point of being almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between an online attack and an attack in real life?
Also terrifying is the question of how, in a broader sense, spatial computing will change what we consider reality. Researchers from Stanford and Michigan University recently conducted a study on the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature that brings VR content into your real-world environment so you can see what’s going on around you happens while you’re using the device) and came out with some stark warnings about how this technology could rewire our brains and “disrupt social connection.”
These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras you use to see the world can edit your environment – for example, you can walk to the shops wearing these, and it can remove all the homeless from your view and make the sky clearer.
“What we’re going to experience is that by using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,” Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford and one of the study’s lead researchers, recently told Business Insider. “People will be in the same physical place and experience simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We are going to lose common ground.”
It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality could change that’s scary: it’s the fact that a small number of companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Think about how much influence big tech already has when it comes to the content we see, and then multiply that a million times. Do you think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they look even more realistic.
We are seeing a global rise of authoritarianism. If we’re not careful, this kind of technology will accelerate this tremendously. Being able to suck people in an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That is every 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 donuts and Vision Pros.