The June 6 news article “With Vision Pro, Apple makes its case for a computer on your face” noted a feature of Apple’s new Vision Pro headset: When you are wearing the Vision Pro, you can see others in the room with you and thus you don’t feel left out. But is the one wearing the Vision Pro the one who is really left out? I remember the moment when my young daughter got hooked on her first experience of a video (Disney’s “Cinderella”). I not only felt “left out,” but I also felt that she was no longer together “with me” in the same room.
My problem with the Vision Pro and this direction technology is taking is not only that it leaves others out but, even more important, that it generates ever more “experiences,” be they “immersive” or not, that we can’t share with others (our friends, our partners, our children, our co-workers, et al.). Aren’t our “deepest experiences,” the ones we live by, not experiences that leave others out but instead experiences shared with others? Even René Descartes wrote his deepest experience — “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) — for a reader.
I wish Apple CEO Tim Cook and the media would think more critically about how this new technology of “immersive experience” will intensify the primacy of the individual (“me first/me only” and its consequent “loneliness”) by augmenting its introversion (and asociality in the sense of its “failure to feel responsibility” for the suffering or well-being of others). Isn’t the challenge today to break down solipsism (self-relation) and increase/create solidarity with others (relationality) — others in the world with us?
Kathleen Wright, Philadelphia
