Hawaii, because Florida.

As an intellectual exercise, what do you suppose are the chances that Vance is a nazi? I don’t mean ‘nazi’ in a rhetorical sense, and I don’t mean ‘nazi’ in the sense that his worldview and ideologies overlap with those of nazis. I mean, what are the chances that he’s actually in his basement with a brown shirt, seig heil-ing from time to time? It probably doesn’t matter, as long as his civic actions support that cause anyway. But I wonder this each time I hear yet another awful detail about this loser. I peg it at about 10%, low but definitely above zero.

Let me clarify. My complaint about the retro-futuristic nature of XR is not the age of the idea. The problem is that this approach has been speculated about and productized in various ways for decades. Through all of that, it has never amounted to more than niche applications, has been rejected by wider markets repeatedly, and failed to inspire much more imagined usefulness beyond being an escape vehicle from some kind of real-world hellscape. Despite all of that, entities like apple insist on trying again, and again, and again. I am convinced that Tim Cook sees this as the future because of the residue of his childhood musing about the future. I know for a fact that Zuckerberg is motivated by exactly that.

Now let’s compare that to audio UIs. These have also been around for a long time. In that time, they have only become more pervasive, useful and inspirational (see again my reference to Jarvis). Additionally, I’m not just talking about the audio part of that interface. I’m talking about the agents that can act independently, and spontaneously to help humans do what the want to do. We are making tremendous progress on that front, but Apple is (in terms of this product line) mired in the past.

I have so much to say about this, I hardly know where to start. A few brief points:

Yes, this product direction is problematic in many many ways. There is a reason why science fiction has been speculating about these types of devices for decades and nearly always portraying the technology as an escape mechanism for a horrifying dystopian reality.

We’ve experienced several really big technology revolutions in just a few decades (pc, internet, social, mobile). All have brought wonderful improvements to life, but all have had profound, and unanticipated side effects. In all instances, we would have benefited as a society by interrogating consequences more completely at the beginning, rather than just letting market forces alone to drive them into mass adoption.

The good news is that none of this is really new. This appears to be a pretty good implementation of a UI model that consumers have been largely rejecting for over 30 years. There are absolutely very useful, very good uses for these UIs, but these are niche markets overall all.

In many ways, XR (a catch all term for both VR and AR) is a retro futuristic idea. This is a vision of the future as seen 40 years ago. Really innovative human computer interfacing doesn’t look like this anymore. Actually useful innovation involves things like agents, voice ui’s and so on (think Jarvis from the MCU).

The question is, can Apple’s marketing prowess and effectively infinite budget push a largely unpleasant, unneeded, and expensive product into mass adoption? I am hopeful that they can’t. I am hopeful that reality isn’t sci-fi dystopian enough to create a wide market for this. If they can, it may say more about how dystopian our real reality has become. That’s the really worrisome part to me.