If you ever worry that technology might be getting a little too intelligent and robots are poised to take over the world, I have a quick and easy way to deflate those fears: call up a company and try to ask them a simple question. You will be put through to an automated voice system and spend the next 10 minutes yelling NO, I DIDN’T SAY THAT! WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘YOU DIDN’T QUITE CATCH THAT?’ I DON’T WANT ANY OF THOSE OPTIONS! PUT ME THROUGH TO A HUMAN, GODDAMMIT!
That was certainly my experience calling up Apple and trying to reconfirm my Vision Pro demo, which had been abruptly cancelled due to snow. But if my phone experience felt ancient, the Apple Vision Pro headset itself felt like a startling glimpse of the future. As it should: the thing costs $3,499.
My expectations, I’ll own, were fairly low. For the last decade or so we’ve been told that virtual reality and augmented reality are just around the corner, but they’ve consistently failed to enter into the mainstream. The headsets have been clunky and impractical, the prices have been sky-high, and the experience itself has been impressive but not exactly awe-inspiring. The metaverse (a rebranding of virtual reality) has been similarly disappointing.
The Vision Pro, however, was genuinely impressive. I felt like Usher, I kept saying “woah” so much during the demo. The Vision Pro is branded as “spatial computing”, rather than an entertainment device, and is meant to be used for everything from answering emails to browsing the internet – you navigate with your eyes and scroll by pinching your fingers and moving your hands like you’re conducting an invisible orchestra.
Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect of it is the immersive video. Everything else just feels a little gimmicky: do I want to see my computer apps floating in front of me? Not really! Watching a movie, however, feels like you’ve been transported into the content. If money was no object, I would have snapped up a headset straightaway just because watching films is so fun on it.
And that is basically the extent of the market for the Vision Pro right now: people for whom money is really no object. The headset is impressive but it’s still not exactly comfortable (and good luck drinking coffee while wearing it) and not at the point where it justifies the price tag. We are still in the early stages of this technology and it’s going to be a while before it gains steam in the wider culture.
But while it’s hard to say when spatial computing is going to become as ubiquitous as the smartphone is today, it is clear that its widespread adoption is a matter of when, not if. There is no debate that we are moving towards a world where “real life” and digital technology seamlessly blur. The internet is moving off our screens and into 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 to rush this technology out but it’s not clear how much they’ve been worrying 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 crash that’s been caused by someone using the headset while driving. There are already plenty of videos circulating of people using the Vision Pro while out and about, including in their cars. (Apple, by the way, tells people not to use the headset while driving but hasn’t included any guardrails that stop the technology being used by someone behind the wheel.)
It also seems depressingly inevitable that, without some sort of radical intervention, these headsets are soon going to 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 scarily real because of how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between real life and the digital world blur to a point that they are almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between online assault and an attack in real life?
Also terrifying is the question of how, more broadly, spatial computing is going to alter what we consider reality. Researchers from Stanford and University of Michigan recently undertook a study on the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature which brings VR content into your real-world surrounding so you see what’s around you while using the device) and emerged with some stark warnings about how this tech might rewire our brains and “interfere with social connection”.
These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your environment – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it might delete all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.
“What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,” Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford and one of the lead researchers of the study, recently told Business Insider. “People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.”
It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality might be altered 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 content we see, and then multiply that a million times over. You think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they seem even more realistic.
We’re seeing a global rise of authoritarianism. If we’re not careful this sort of technology is going to massively accelerate it. Being able to suck people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That’s an authoritarian’s dream. We’re entering an age where people can be mollified and manipulated like never before. Forget Mussolini’s bread and circuses, budding fascists now have doughnuts and Vision Pros.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
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