On the heels of Apple’s announcement of its Vision Pro headset, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey shares his thoughts on where Virtual Reality (VR) is heading and how it will change the world as we know it. Unfortunately, it looks like there aren’t many helping hands to take humanity’s hand on the journey ahead.
Asked what he feels the future of VR will look like, Dorsey shares an imagined vision of humanity driven by the technology – one that he acknowledges may remind people of the Pixar movie Wall-E. A future where people live their lives surrounded by VR and surrounded by virtual, AI leaders –what Dorsey refers to as “floating chairs, [where] drinking [people’s] food out of straws.”
However, Dorsey also expresses concern about what this technology will mean for society and humanity. “I would say, follow [science-fiction novels] like Snow Crash for a little bit of what’s to come technologically and vision wise,” the Twitter CEO tells The Byte.
“But at the same time, I do think a vision that people have today of an over-privatised world where you have people sitting in chairs by themselves is a very realistic, in my mind, vision of this technology,” he continues. “I think people will become more lonely, more out of touch, more distant from one another. It’s a technology that I think will be used in a less positive way.”
While Dorsey suggests that part of countering this dark seen may lie in more companies opening-sourcing their large language models, he also says he is “feeling more and more that more of [VR’s] impact is negative than positive.”
“It’s about getting people together,” the Twitter CEO concludes. “Building community. Eating food together, and that is terribly inefficient. I really do think that [VR] will be designed to distract. So the first use case of a technology will actually be anti-social and anti-humanity.”
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is largely aimed at enterprise customers and will come with a price tag of $3,500 (£2,999 in the UK). This has led Apple to be criticised for creating what looks to be the first VR headset priced “for the 1%,” as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg puts it.
Zuckerberg’s reaction to the Apple demo comes as good old Facebook emerges as one of the leaders in the current VR market, alongside competitors like Sony and Google. Despite having these competitors to contend with, Zuckerburg echoes Dorsey’s warning and shares that he too was surprised to find that “the demo [of Apple’s VR headset] wasn’t a VR demo of some spaceship’s wheels […] It was literally someone sitting on a couch looking around.”
While VR is still in its infancy, there is big potential for the technology to change our lives and the future of humanity. As VR becomes more mainstream and potentially more invasive over the coming years, it’s important to remember to consider the implications of our quickly growing Virtual Reality footprint.