The Social Athlete
A weekly podcast exploring the upper limits of social fitness and relationship success.
The Social Athlete
Apple's Vision Pro & The Future of Social Interactions
After two weeks of interacting with my Vision Pro, I am both excited and terrified about the future of social interactions.
In this week's episode, we explore the thrilling potential the Vision Pro has to bring us closer together in virtual spaces. We also delve into the unmistakable dystopian fears this device rightly instills in us--a world where we are all sucked into our own virtual worlds, further fracturing the fragile social foundations of our modern world.
As you'll hear, I have more questions than answers right now. However, I propose a few common-sense cultural choices we can and should make today... while we wrestle with the awesome and terrifying potential of this new device.
Hello and welcome to Social Athlete. I'm your host, casey Wright. Today I wanted to take a few minutes just to discuss my thoughts on the new Vision Pro. I've been using this device now for a little over two weeks and I want to talk about what's good and what's bad, and I want to specifically talk about what I see as the potential social implications of this device. This is obviously not a tech podcast. This is a podcast about relationships, and so I want to talk about what is going to be the likely outcome of everyone strapping these virtual environments to their eyes, and I've been obsessed with the news and the reporting on this. It's been really fascinating. I've been trying to gobble up everything I can, specifically about what social psychologists and psychologists are saying about the likely mental health and societal impact of this, and it's interesting when you read these stories. Pretty much every story about the Vision Pro is an extreme take. It's either this is an absolute flop Apple's really lost its fastball or this is an absolute game changer. This is the future of computing and on the social side, it's everything from this is going to bring in a brand new utopia where we're all going to be able to construct these magical virtual environments where we can interact with each other in real time, or it's going to be an absolute dystopia where we're going to be sucked into these virtual environments and completely isolated from each other. Now, after spending a couple of weeks with this device, I understand why you get these extreme takes. I mean, part of it is our current media landscape, where the hottest, spiciest take is the one that gets the most clicks, gets the most eyeballs, and so everyone is incentivized to have the hottest take they can on this. So everything polarizes to the extreme good or the extreme bad. That's part of it, but part of it really is the nature of this device.
Speaker 1:This device is different than anything I've used since the original iPhone, and what I mean by that is I remember when I got the first iPhone, I was one of those crazy people that I drove 200 miles away to find an Apple store that actually had them in stock and didn't already have a line around the corner. I went and stayed the night in my car and got up I was the second person in line to buy the first iPhone. I remember the date June 29, 2007. And I remember getting that device and holding it in my hands and just feeling like I had a piece of the future and I had all the most advanced what you could call smartphones. Up to that, I was a big BlackBerry user. So I was initiated with using phones for email, for as an internet device, even as a media device. None of that was really new to me.
Speaker 1:But the first time that you started interacting with the touchscreen and all of a sudden you could just touch the things you wanted to use instead of having to use these awkward little cordy keyboard devices, you could just see how this was going to change everything. But at the same time it was very clumsy. The first iPhone it was almost impossible to type on. It had very little functionality. In fact it had lower functionality than a lot of the other similar devices at the time. The BlackBerry was a substantially better messaging and email device for at least the first couple of years that the iPhone came out. There were better media devices.
Speaker 1:But it was the input, it was just the interaction. It just felt magical. It was magical and it was clumsy, and when I look at this Vision Pro, those are the two adjectives that pop up again. It is magical and it is clumsy In the sense that when you put this on, and I've again. I've tested all the other 3d. You know I'm very much an early adopter on this stuff, so I get the first quest when it comes out. I got the latest quest when it came out. I got the Google glass when they came out, a bunch of other you know Stupid kind of touch point technologies and route to this vision pro, and none of them have this experience.
Speaker 1:Where you put it on, you go, oh my god, this is definitely the future. But again, it's clumsy, it's make sure eyes hurt, it's heavy. You carry this cable around but it has a super heavy battery pack, at least for me. It's hard to use it for more than I don't know, maybe 90 minutes without really feeling pretty uncomfortable. So it's hard for me even to make it through an entire movie without feeling a little bit uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:But all of these problems almost all of them, are going to be temporary. Right, the form factor is going to keep getting smaller. It's going to keep getting miniaturized. The little buggy things that it has where it struggles in low light environments or when you're close to certain objects or whatever, all that stuff is going to go away. You know the incremental improvement of this device. If you just follow on the straight trajectory that you expect technological progress to go on, this is going to end in a place that is truly magical. I mean, we're going to end in a place where, basically, we just have our sunglasses, can operate as vision pros. I don't know if that's three years out, I don't know if that's seven years out, I don't know if that's 12 years out, but it's definitely not more than that, and if I had to place a bet on it, I'd say three to four years from now, we reach a form factor that is truly a mainstream device, that Kind of makes good on all the promise of this original device. So I think we're headed there.
Speaker 1:Anybody who is saying that this is a flop Whether that they don't think this is going to catch mainstream attention, or that it's too overpriced and no one will ever get into it Just has not put one of these headsets on yet, and I really would encourage you do that. You go into the Apple store. You can do the demo, even if you're not going to buy one. Go spend 30 minutes so you can see what this technology looks like. Whether or not you ever want to own one of these headsets. You owe it to yourself to understand this, the future that we're stepping into, because it is going to change everything.
Speaker 1:So I want to start before I get into what really concerns me about this technology, because and I've really been trying to think about Again I didn't want to come in with the spiciest take just to, you know, get clicks and eyeballs. I wanted to say what I believe to be true and I've been taking some time to really think about what I believe to be true, comments that are true for me now and I think will be true for me a decade from now as well. And you know I'm not sure that I got it right, but I want to kind of go through that and I want to start by talking about what I think is positive. What are the possibilities here that could be really awesome? So the first one I Don't know if you remember seeing the original Google Glass commercials.
Speaker 1:Google, this Google Glass was their AR product that was basically just a set of glasses that would. They were clear glasses that would sit on your eyes. They weren't like a full VR headset, but then they could populate the glasses with, basically digital information, so you could look at a building and it would show you the Yelp reviews for the restaurants there. You know, just overlaid on your glasses, as a, for instance, so not anywhere near the same immersive device. But if you remember the commercials for that, what they would do is they would just kind of show this compilation of everyone just being buried in their phones all day right, everybody's looking down at their laps, looking down at their phones, and they were like what Google Glass is going to allow you to do is to Take your head out of your phone, take your head out of your lap and start looking and interacting with the world around you, and you want to make a choice between seeing the digital information you care about and seeing the real world around you. That was the original promise of Google Glass, and that was an all-there advertising.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, the product itself was a flop, but I do think that the promise of that technology is, to me, the most exciting thing about this, and that's one of the things we have to think about when we're looking at this in a vacuum. The Vision Pro is not the first tech device that gives us access to the internet. It's just the latest one and the most immersive one, and what's likely going to happen is not just that it's going to layer on top of our Smartphone use, but it's going to cannibalize some of it, and I think maybe that's the best case scenario for this. Right, if we do get to that future where these are just glasses that sit on your face, they're not obtrusive at all. You can flip very easily between the digital layering and just seeing the world around you, so you can have them off and just be interacting with people, and then you can pop on the digital display and it can be as immersive or as unimmersive as you want. That's probably a superior world than the one we have now, where people are continually breaking contact with the world to just look at what's going on in their phone. So, to the extent that the, you know, call it the third, fourth, fifth generation of this that really is not obtrusive and it doesn't take you away from the world around you, or at least it doesn't have to. If that replaces smartphones, maybe that's a benefit, maybe that is better, maybe that's something we can be excited about.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I look at that I think is really exciting about this is that it is going to make it easier to socialize virtually in really cool ways. You know, my brother and I are Clippers fans. We've been Clippers fans since we were kids. I live in New York. Now he still lives in Southern California. Maybe once a year we're able to I can get out there. At the same time there's good Clippers game. We can go watch one together.
Speaker 1:But when I think about the future of the MBA app, which will almost certainly have the ability for me to select any seat in the arena and to be virtually seated next to anybody that I want to, from any of my friends all around the world, and I think about the fact that me and my brother could just be, you know, courtside at the Clippers game on a Tuesday night, even though we're 3,000 miles away, and that it would actually feel like that experience on a lot of different levels Obviously not as good as being in person, but we don't have the opportunity to go to in-person games all year long. We would have the opportunity to do this maybe once or twice a week. I could see that being a really good thing for me and my brother. I could see that being a really good thing for relationships everywhere.
Speaker 1:Now the thing that concerns me is that I think what's going to happen is, not only am I going to have some of those virtual interactions when I would have been watching the game at home alone and I think that's absolutely an improvement but this is going to completely kill the incentive for my brother and I to actually find that one game a year that we go in person. Why would we do that if we're watching 30 games a year virtually together? So this is kind of the double-edged sword of this thing. Right Is that it's going to make it easier for us to socialize virtually in meaningful ways that are much better than you know a Zoom conversation or a FaceTime or a phone call. They'll feel much more like you're actually sitting next to that person or acting like that person.
Speaker 1:Again, not yet, but that's going to be coming. That, to me, is exciting, but I think that the net effect of it is going to be that we're going to spend a lot more time socializing like that and a lot less time socializing in the real world. And if you understand the point of this podcast, that means that this device is a heat-seeking missile designed to kill everything that this show cares about. It is going to suck us into our own immersive worlds and it's going to reduce the incentive that we have to try and interact with each other in the real world. And I think the social consequences for that are going to be damaging both at the individual level and, more broadly, at the societal level.
Speaker 1:And a lot of ways you can see everything that we've seen with smartphones, social media, all those trend lines you can just kind of accelerate. And that's really what this is going to do, because all those things do is they replace real world experiences with digital experiences. The digital experiences keep getting better. The real world doesn't. Fact, I think a lot of us would say that the real world seems to keep getting worse. I'm not sure that I agree with that. I think a lot of that is just that we get our real world to the straw. Social media I'm, you know, we're kind of drinking this ocean through a straw and you were on our own little filter bubbles and we see whatever Piss us off or, you know, makes us the most angry. That ends up in our feet all the time and the net effect of that is that we think the world is getting worse when it probably isn't. But the same time, our digital worlds are getting more and more personalized, more and more magical, more and more customized. And so you have this deviation where the virtual world keeps getting better and our incentives for spending time they're keep getting greater. In the real world either in actuality, or at least in perception seems to keep getting worse and the incentives for interacting there keep diminishing. There was a study that came out the other day that showed that the last decade, adults are spending 30% less time together just hanging out. For young people it's even less. It's more like 50%. And this is not. We're not talking 20, 30 or trend lines, we're talking this is in the last 10 years. This is since the prevalence of smartphones and social media.
Speaker 1:Now, I remember when smartphones and social media were coming out and people had the same concerns that I'm expressing right now about the vision pro, and I was one of the people who was saying all of these concerns are overblown. Social media is going to have the effect of making people socialize more often. You know, in the old world, when I left high school and went to college, I didn't stay in touch with any of the people I went to high school with because there wasn't really any sort of technology to do that unless I had their email address or their phone number. It wasn't going to happen. But now every single person that I've interacted with at any point in my life as a Facebook friend, as an Instagram friend and I have a front row seat to what's going on their lives I do stay in touch with them and I thought that that was going to cancel out whatever diminished socialization was going to take place, because we are being incentivized to socialize virtually.
Speaker 1:I really thought if you would have asked me, I would have said social media will be a social good. I really believe that I could have given you 10 reasons why, and I could not have been more wrong. So this time around, I'm kind of I'm on the other side of this. This time I'm saying I'm actually going to take seriously the threats and the concerns, because my experience of technology over the last 10, 15 years Is that eventually we do realize all of our most dystopian outcomes, and it's only when we realize those dystopian outcomes whether it's the record high teen suicide rates or the epidemic we have of loneliness, or the complete political polarization one we have that seems to be threatening and fracturing our very democracy seems like we're not going to take these problems seriously until we have actually achieved every single dystopian outcome that we were afraid of achieving, and I'm really hoping this time around we can take a different tack, because what's on the table here is not just showing you something different on your phone or on your tablet. It's literally changing what you see in the world, and when you think about the fact that these devices will be connected to the Internet, they will be connected to social media, it means that they're going to bring with them all of the same problems of the Internet and social media, and now they're going to strap them to your face.
Speaker 1:And keep in mind, these devices are two way devices. They're not only showing you the world. They're taking real time measurements of how you are diverting your attention in the world. They have very sophisticated algorithms that are making sense of this technology, and what you're going to see pretty soon here is that we're going to have foreign governments, right wing trolls, left wing nuts, these multi billion dollar companies that don't seem to care about anything other than making money, even if it means the complete breakdown of everything else that we care about. All of them are going to have access to this information, to your eyeballs and to showing you what the world looks like.
Speaker 1:That, to me, means that the stakes here are really high, so you must be asking what am I actually advocating here? Am I returning my Vision Pro? No, I'm not. I think it's awesome. I'm going to hold on to it. I still really think there's some cool things about this device. I'm excited to use this in socially constructive ways some of the ones that I previously described and I want to be on the forefront of that. And I want to make clear I don't think there's any standing against this technical revolution. I don't think me returning my Vision Pro or spending the next 52 weeks on this podcast just railing against the Vision Pro. None of that's going to stop what's coming. This is coming, it's going to happen. The incentives are too strong. The technology is too addictive and too magical for it not to catch mainstream appeal. So what I'm proposing and what I think we really need to do is we need to create a culture around Vision Pros that is more constructive than we have around the internet and social media.
Speaker 1:Derek Thompson, one of my favorite podcasters, on his podcast Plain English the way he described it is that maybe we should think of this like digital alcohol, in the sense that you know it's okay to enjoy a drink now and then. I like to drink. Most people like to enjoy a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. There's no problem with that. But we have a whole culture around excess in alcohol and a whole set of cultural choices we've made around when alcohol is acceptable and when it's not. So if you have a friend who gets up first thing in the morning and takes a shot, you're probably going to talk to them about that. That's not a healthy way to use alcohol. If your 14-year-old starts drinking alcohol, you're certainly going to intervene on that because we all understand that's not an acceptable way for alcohol to be used. We don't let people drive when they've been drinking. We have a whole set of social and cultural choices that we've made around sexual behavior when alcohol is involved All sorts of things that we've done. We've built this up over hundreds of years. The problem is we're not going to have hundreds of years to do this at the Vision Pro, but I do think that the alcohol analogy is effective because it's a good start on some of the places where we maybe should start to pay attention.
Speaker 1:Number one I do think we really need to restrict these devices for children, at least until we understand them better. I don't know what this is doing to my brain, but when I have this thing on for two hours it definitely takes me some time to readjust afterwards. And this is after only two weeks of using this. My brain's already pretty much fully developed, I imagine. I can't imagine this is good for a 10-year-old and 11-year-old. I don't know, but if I had a child, I would not want them to be using this device, at least not yet, not until we know more and I think that might be really easy to say right now and a lot of people listening to this are just nodding along but I can tell you that the incentive to strap this to your five-year-old's face and just be left alone for two hours is going to be very high. Whatever relief you think an iPad gives you from your child for an hour or two, this is going to be far greater. So the incentives to let children use these in even small use cases, I think, is going to be very high. I personally think that's a really bad idea.
Speaker 1:I also think that we should start to develop some language around excessive use, to my mind. I really do think using this daily would probably be a problem, just like I think if you were drinking every day, that's probably a problem. Certainly, if you're using it daily for long periods of time, I think that's a real problem. I think if you were using it maybe, in short, use cases daily, okay, I think. If you want to, on the weekends, maybe use it for a couple hours, I think great. Again, I think if you're prioritizing some of the more socially constructive uses that we've identified here I think some of those are better, but I think those are a couple places we can start is really focusing on limiting any sort of excessive use and designing some language around what that looks like. I think I would say more than two hours a day, maybe. That's the two drinks a day type of thing. Or most doctors will say if you're having two glasses or wine at dinner, that's fine, but if you start getting into three or four at night, well now that's not going to be too healthy and that's associated with a lot of negative health outcomes.
Speaker 1:I suspect, without knowing for sure, that we're going to find similarly, that people that use these devices often and for long periods of time are going to have all sorts of adverse health effects. Some of these are probably pretty easy to anticipate in terms of attention spans, in terms of vision problems, but I suspect there are going to be some that are going to surprise us and they might be some of the scariest ones. So, from my standpoint, I certainly don't want to be the guinea pig on this that's using this for hours a week, every week. This is going to find a small part of my life, in the same sense as having a couple drinks with friends on the weekend or having a couple of glasses or wine at dinner. So I think that might be a useful way to start thinking about this.
Speaker 1:Of course, this will be a subject of future episodes. I expect this is going to come up a lot. This is going to be something people are thinking about a lot. This is going to come to define a lot of 2024, and, I think, really a lot of our next decade. So I am genuinely excited to see where this technology goes and I am genuinely terrified. That's it for this week. I'm Casey Wright and this has been the Social Athlete.