Apple Vision Pro highlights the dangers posed by blended reality goggles to literally re-wire your brain. Synthetic environments distort distance, disassociate your body in space and time, distort real objects, and create new ones. Your reality is manufactured by you and specific only to you, forfeiting shared reality by those around you.
Got pesky people in the room? Delete them. Don’t want to see homeless people on the way to work? Erase them. Want to turn your home into a perpetual “Ready Player One”, no problem.
“What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,” Bailenson says. “People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.“
Losing the ability to share common experiences and perspectives turns your “reality” into a one-off hallucination known only to you.
This will eventually push millions of people into a condition of clinical psychosis:
Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. This might involve seeing or hearing things that other people cannot see or hear (hallucinations) and believing things that are not actually true (delusions). It may also involve confused (disordered) thinking and speaking.
The 3 main symptoms of psychosis are:
hallucinations – where a person hears, sees and, in some cases, feels, smells or tastes things that do not exist outside their mind but can feel very real to the person affected by them; a common hallucination is hearing voices
delusions – where a person has strong beliefs that are not shared by others; a common delusion is someone believing there’s a conspiracy to harm them
disordered thinking and speaking – a person’s thoughts and ideas come very quickly, which can make their speech fast and confusing
This is simulacrum! Does Apple understand what it is doing to humanity? Undoubtedly. That’s the point. If Technocrats already Live in s simulacrum, why wouldn’t they want you to live there too? ⁃ TN Editor
The reviews are in, and the tech press is lauding the Apple Vision Pro headset for delivering on the company’s promises. It’s well-designed, the video and sound are startlingly precise, the “Minority Report”-style gestural interface is future-tastic. Nobody’s exactly sure what it’s for, or whether even the Readiest Players One will spend $3,500 on it, but hey — that’s gadgets for you.
Still, this is a new gadget frontier. The Vision Pro, like the similarly kitted-out Quest 3 and Quest Pro headsets from Meta, uses what’s known as “passthrough” video — cameras and other sensors that capture imagery of the outside world and reproduce it inside the device. 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. Apple and Meta are hoping that this virtual world will be so compelling that you won’t just visit. They’re hoping you’ll live there.
That, unfortunately, could have some very weird and very messy consequences for the human brain. Researchers have found that widespread, long-term immersion in VR headsets could literally change the way we perceive the world — and each other. “We now have companies who are advocating that you spend many hours each day in them,” says Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. “You’ve got many, many people, and they’re wearing it for many, many hours. And everything magnifies at scale.”
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 short-term side effects of virtual reality are well established. People in synthetic environments tend to misjudge distance, both at a distance and close up. That’s no surprise: Even in the real, three-dimensional universe, our ability to determine how close or far away something is is subject to all kinds of external factors. Virtual environments, with their lower resolution and synthetic 3D, make all that worse — which is especially bad if you’re one of those users posting videos of yourself doing things like skateboarding and driving while wearing a mixed-reality headset. You think your hands are in one place, they’re actually in another, and pretty soon you’re driving your Honda Civic through a supermarket.
Read More: Goodbye Reality: Simulacrum Ushered In By Apple Vision Pro