Apple’s Vision Pro Will Make You Think Different, All Right
Elon Musk (Neuralink) isn't the only one getting into your head
Speaking of the Super Bowl, as popular as the event itself are the Super Bowl commercials. Which wasn’t always the case. 40 Years Ago, This Ad Changed the Super Bowl Forever. It was Apple’s ‘1984’ spot, directed by Ridley Scott, when Apple announced the Mackintosh computer, claiming that because of it, “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984,” the dystopic George Orwell novel. As The New York Times noted, the ad also helped to establish the Super Bowl as TV’s biggest commercial showcase. Then again, since its inception, Apple had established itself as the company known for its uncanny knack to think different.
On the eve of this year’s Super Bowl, Apple released its long-anticipated Apple Vision Pro and this just in: Beware: The Apple Vision Pro may rewire our brains in unexpected ways, MSN reported.
Not quite what we had in mind when the company first suggested that we ‘think different.’
“They feed you a synthetic environment made to look like the real one, with Apple apps and other non-real elements floating in front of it.
“Researchers have found that widespread, long-term immersion in VR headsets could literally change the way we perceive the world — and each other... For a few minutes or an hour, long enough to play a game or watch a movie, they're minor annoyances. But wear perception-shifting glasses for days at a time — as Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford, and his team of researchers did — and the problems get worse. Way worse.
With the headset, users are looking at a world re-rendered. “Because passthrough captures and then re-renders reality, it can have an unnerving, distancing effect over time.
“Long-term use of passthrough headsets could make it easier to think of other people as unhumans — non-player characters in a gamified, uncanny valley…Meaning: Our brains are about to undergo a massive, society-wide experiment that could rewire our sense of the world around us, and make it even harder to agree on what constitutes reality.”
The human brain has an amazing ability to compensate/adapt – but to an unreal world and what could possibly go wrong?
Apple itself warned on its website to “Never use Apple Vision Pro while operating a moving vehicle, bicycle, heavy machinery, or in any other situations requiring attention to safety. Using the device in low light conditions may increase the risk of collision with objects in your environment.”
Do Vision Pro glassholes listen? Case in point: the Human pulled over for using Apple Internet Goggles while driving. This doesn’t look dangerous at all.
“A decade or so ago, no one paused to consider the unintended consequences of thrusting millions of people into impossible-to-moderate social networks. And we all know how that turned out. Now, we're on the verge of sticking millions of people into helmets that give us all our own editable realities,” the piece cautioned, and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
If you’re at all concerned about Elon Musk and his neural implants, sounds like the Apple Vision Pro may well be a form of a neural implant for the Everyman.
And welcome to the first significant step into the matrix.
Every now and then, Apple does have a way of coming along and changing everything, although lately, not always in a good way. And who would have thought that with the release of the Mackintosh computer back in 1984, that it would somehow lead us into a future world that would look more like “1984.” Onward and forward.
Exactly. Society lives in misperception already. Just what they need: brains rewired for more misperception and the inevitable manipulation. Luckily, these devices are financially out of reach of most people, especially in the present and future economy, so the societal effect will likely be minimal.
It does remind me of the HoloLens videos when that first came out. There was a scene where everyone on the street was walking and seeing the world through that thing. I guess product managers can dream.
Tech will do what it wants to do, and all we can do is sound the alarm. We’ve witnessed Big Tech’s agenda to date, and we don’t suspect it’ll change any time soon. Santayana said that what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat, and as true as that is, I choose to defer to Dorothy Parker here, who when asked to use the word ‘horticulture’ in a sentence said, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”