The Apple Vision Pro is Terrifying for Humanity's Future

I hate being bored, don't you? My mind starts to wander. I stress about work, friends, and what I'll be doing with my life in 5, 10, 20 years. I feel fidgety and uncomfortable. A study by the National Institute of Health showed that boredom can disrupt motivation, reduce pleasure, and interfere with goal-directed behavior. It can even contribute to depressive and anxiety symptoms because we start to overthink things.

Being bored inherently means we're not being productive, right? What if we could solve boredom, though? We're certainly trying. We've got the internet at our fingertips, but the problem is when we look up from our screens, the problems of the real world are still there to haunt us. What if we never had to look away from our screens, though? What if we could spend every waking hour locked into the digital world, as far away from the physical as possible?

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, meet the Apple Vision Pro. At first glance, you'll notice Apple's classically sleek design for this mixed reality headset, but beneath the design is so much more. This headset fully covers your eyes and forehead and acts as a single device combining large-scale TVs, projectors, and immersive audio. Many reviewers are saying that the product is genius.

It runs the classic Apple apps and many other 2D apps inside a fully 3D environment, making it both incredibly practical for everyday work and completely out of this world for creating a new and exciting universe to live in. It even has pass-through video technology so that if you want to, you can still see the outside world while you're wearing the device, and the outside world can see you. Your eyes are projected onto the external screen so that friends, family, and strangers can look right back at you while you're in the headset.

The Apple Vision Pro seems to be the perfect cure for our sometimes gray existence. It creates a new world that's happy, hopeful, and colorful. It's filled with new friends, new ways to do business, new places to travel, and ways to catch up with family. We could, at this very moment, be witnessing a change in human-to-human and human-to-computer interaction unfolding before our very eyes. Some are even asking if this might be as dramatic and life-altering as the introduction of the iPhone.

It's an inflection point for virtual and augmented reality, promising advances in medicine and gaming. It has the potential to democratize access to information and training in a way that we can't yet imagine. Most importantly, it could mean a life without boredom. On the other hand, it might end up being an expensive misstep by Apple. Mark Zuckerberg is banking on his less expensive Quest headset being the product people actually want. But Apple is confident that we would pay $3,500 for Vision. Even Steve Jobs predicted it would come to fruition one day, imagining a device that does for video what headphones did for audio.

Now, certain features still need some ironing out, like the external battery pack that's tethered to the user via a cable. This might mean that the headset isn't totally ready to be worn outside the comfort of your home, and Apple knows it too. In a demo session, they asked journalists not to take pictures of the battery pack and only allowed photos from their own photographers to be published after the fact.

But this slightly inelegant piece of the design isn't what's unnerving about the Apple Vision Pro. For all the amazing possibilities the device might bring, there are reasons to be afraid—very afraid—even of what a Vision Pro-dominated future might look like, and it starts with your eyeballs. Interestingly, when debuting The Vision Pro, Apple CEO Tim Cook did not put the headset on. It was the first time in Apple product launch history that the CEO didn't use the product on stage. Why?

Well, one guess is that the eyesight feature on the device might be more alarming than revolutionary. The feature works by scanning and calibrating your eyes and keeping track of where you look. Then, it projects an image of your eyes onto the outside of the headset. So, if you've seen photos of the product launch and it seems like you're looking through transparent glass at the demonstrator's eyes, you're not. You're seeing a digital image of their eyes staring back at you.

But it's not your face, not your skin, your eyes; your eyebrows. It's not the wrinkles on your forehead or the tears in your eyes; it's an image, a digital rendering of your features and emotions, an AI recreation of your face meant to give the illusion of eye contact. As the saying goes, our eyes are the windows to the soul. So, when the Vision Pro scans our eyes and face to project it outwards, are we actually giving it access to something deeper?

The headset isn't just looking at your physical eyes; it looks deeper at things like electrical brain activity, heart rates and rhythms, muscle activity, and blood density in the brain. It calculates blood pressure and skin conductance. Yes, it's taking measurements to keep you healthy and allow seamless use of the product. But once you give a company access to the physical data that truly makes you, you, how far will they go with it?

The Vision Pro already uses this data to predict what you'll do next with the device, basically creating an algorithm from your biology. Apple's research figured out how our pupils react before we even click on something, so the device can adjust to our cognitive state in real time. Revolutionary? Creepy? Once the Vision Pro can quite literally see into our souls, are we leaving ourselves open to exploitation? What if Apple or the other companies paying Apple decide to place subliminal messaging into the devices?

And what other elements of Apple's new technology that we don't even know about are woven into this device? The technological developments of the Vision Pro have the potential to take data selling to a whole new level. The ideas for to make this product so mainstream and undeniably necessary that it will eventually be as persuasive as the iPhone.

Here's how it goes. First, Apple released pre-orders of the device. This, like the release of all the other buzzy Apple products, created a sense of exclusivity and excitement. It also gave Apple an idea of consumers' appetite for the product. At $3,500 each, the Vision Pro is too expensive for most people, but many bet at $1,000 iPhones, and look where we are now.

Next comes the marketing push. Apple will tell you exactly what I did—that the device can solve depression, prevent boredom, and create a more productive and ambitious view. Influencers will try to convince you that your life will be better in Apple's virtual reality than it is in actual reality. And then suddenly, the real world just dissolves. We transcend from that monochromatic, boring life into a world filled with pleasure, color, and endless ways to make our dreams come true.

As the buzz spreads, the average Joe, who initially bailed at the price tag, will suddenly feel like he needs the device to feel normal and have the same advantage as his peers. At this point, Apple will probably release a more basic, less expensive model, the Apple Vision and Vision SE. Before we know it, the experience becomes addicting. We enter and stay in Vision Pro world because, after every game, every movie, and every chat, we feel amazing.

We have dopamine rushing through our system with almost no effort to get it, so we want to repeat this experience every day, every hour. As AI advances at an exponential rate, the Vision Pro is the perfect tool to advance with it. We already see how good two-dimensional images are in programs like Dolly, so with these two technologies improving together, we're sure to see unique worlds created at the snap of a finger—worlds that we can live in, have fun in, play in. But the worlds aren't real.

Sooner than you think, the line between what's real and what's not gets blurry. How exactly do tools like ChatGPT work? If you've asked yourself this question and are interested in learning the answer, then I highly recommend you check out the sponsor of today's video, Brilliant.org. The best place to learn anything and everything STEM-related, Brilliant offers an amazing course on how large language models work that teaches you everything you need to know about AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

They also offer a lot of other courses on everything from how algorithms work to TikTok's "For You" page to advanced mathematics and logic. The amazing thing about Brilliant is that the lessons are broken down into bite-sized pieces, and because it's available on a mobile app, you can learn from anywhere at any time—whether you're on your daily commute or standing in line for a coffee.

All of Brilliant's courses are also interactive, with fun features that allow you to challenge yourself and compete with others. If you've been subscribed to this channel for any length of time, then you know Brilliant, and the reason we've been partnered for so long is that I genuinely do use Brilliant in my day-to-day life—whether it's learning about logic to understand philosophy a bit better or understanding more complex science subjects to make these videos.

To try out the "How LLMs Work" course and all the other courses completely free for 30 days, go to Brilliant.org/aperture or click the link in the description. The first 200 people to visit also get 20% off a premium subscription, which unlocks every single course Brilliant has to offer.

Back to our story—does this all lead to the next frontier? A neural implant—something smaller, sleeker, even invisible—that will transport us to the same fantastical places? Something that will remove us from reality? Something that could be used against us? Because what would this mean for bad actors around the world? If a country like China already uses AI to track its citizens, what would happen if everyone wore a Vision Pro and the government could essentially create what it deems as the perfect reality?

If hackers get into the Vision Pro network, suddenly they have control over way more than our bank accounts. They can access our physical being and potentially even our thoughts. Technology is always susceptible to attack and manipulation. What should make this headset any different? The Vision Pro presents a perfect opportunity for tracking people without their knowledge, and in this way, the Vision Pro becomes like a superpowered iPhone.

It allows us to always be in check and always be watched. The mindlessness we feel when we scroll through social media could become our normal state of being. The stress we feel when we're overstimulated by emails and notifications wouldn't just be persuasive and constantly present. It's already hard to put down our phones; what if they were suddenly attached to our forehead? How much harder would it be to let go?

The Vision Pro is potentially a gateway—not just to greater use of technology, but to technology becoming more a part of us than it already is. Some of us mourn the days of paper maps and flip phones, but could you really live without your smartphone? Would you feel like you were missing out on your life if you weren't digitally connected to your friends, family, and a world of information?

We could have never foreseen the scale of technology addiction we find ourselves in these days. We might have seen a chance of privacy issues, but not to the extent we experience them now. It's easy to live in ignorance until you get hacked or your information gets sold to somebody who shouldn't have it. The Vision Pro can make these crimes even easier.

At the same time, having smartphones in a more connected world has gifted us so much. It's created community in so many new ways and has expedited creativity and innovation around the globe. This same push and pull will be true for the Vision Pro. It could advance life in ways we can't imagine—for better or for worse.

But are we willing to tolerate the awkwardness of someone's eyes projected on a screen to communicate with us? What are we willing to tolerate and potentially pay for to find utopia, to find an end to our boredom? Because even with smartphones, we're still incredibly bored. Over 60% of adults report feeling bored at least once a week.

Now, the study I mentioned earlier about the downside of boredom was from 2011, the early years of the iPhone. Eleven years later, in 2022, the Mayo Clinic published an article about the benefits of boredom. It tells us that when we're well-rested and in a space where our attention is allowed to roam, we give our brains time to consolidate memories, to reflect on the lessons we've learned.

We play through scenes from our past and scenarios of our future. We find creative solutions and foster our imagination. Most of us have come up with some pretty amazing ideas while letting our minds wander in the shower. If the Vision Pro is the solution to boredom, a method to get to a place where we always have something to do, see, create, and act upon at our fingertips, is that really what we want?

I'm not so sure, because overstimulation is already ruining our lives. Watch this video to find out all about that.