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Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

I really worry that if AR/VR like Apple Vision takes off, we are going to find ourselves even more alone, isolated, and depressed than ever, separated from the physical humanity we all evolved to live in. Putting a screen between everything is the theme of so many dystopian movies I don't even know where to start.

I mean, I get it. I really, really do. But, man, is this healthy, really?

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I’ve kept in touch with some childhood friends digitally. And I’ve worked while in coffee shops and offices.

I have much more authentic interactions with my friends over Discord than I do with strangers or pseudo-strangers in public. In public then interaction is intentionally inauthentic (which feels emotionally isolating to me, at least); the person wants to be nice to me to get a better tip, I want to be nice to my boss to get a better review. The online interactions with my friends are somewhat hampered by our inability to read body language over a mostly audio medium. The former will require deep societal changes to make into honest interactions. The latter can be fixed by Apple & co using cameras and gyroscopes, which they are already pretty good at. I’m much more optimistic about the latter.

> I want to be nice to my boss to get a better review.

What's dishonest, or "not authentic" about this?

I’ve honestly liked all of my bosses, but it is a relationship that is primarily rooted in financial needs.

I have much more real and honest interaction meeting physically people whome I don't know from childhood. Online it's all a pretentious character acting.

I think this is a generational and medium thing. We clearly have different definitions of "Online".

I'm guessing your online communication is done via something that uses pictures and videos like Instagram or Snapchat?

My main communication to my friends has been text-based chat for over 20 years, and I do have real and honest communication with them. When we meet physically, we continue where we left off online. Even if people have changed hairstyles, gained/lost weight etc. I wouldn't know, we don't share pictures or videos of each other regularly.

I think the other comment identified a mismatch there; I should have been more clear—by “online” I meant in video games and over Discord. Which is to say, individual conversations. If by online you mean something like Instagram or Facebook or other platforms broadcast out to the world, yeah, that can be a bit pretentious and fake.

It's not healthy. It's not healthy because as devices and software improves people who are in isolation use it as a further form of isolation. It's easier to escape into technology than it is to go out and interact with real humans. Life is messy, it's hard but it's entirely rewarding and what we need. But everything we've now come to know in the past three decades has taken us in a different direction. The technology has its valued when used for specific purposes. But when it becomes the all consuming thing that people use to attempt to solve those deeply troubling problems, that's when we have an issue.

So I think part of this only exacerbates escapism. Getting back to true reality is going to require a fundamental jolt to humanity.

>Getting back to true reality

I agree and disagree with this at the same time. Does true reality mean tossing ourselves out in the plains of Africa with a stick fighting off wild animals? I mean ever since that point human intelligence has been on a divergent path from animal intelligence. We create fields and towns and societies that subject us to new realities. Why is one particularly different from another?

At the same time individual divergent realities means society stops existing. What will society look like if we have our own individual universes we can occupy? If you want to take this to an extreme, one could imagine a matrix we voluntarily hook ourselves up to where the machines are left to care for the physical world.

I think there's a distinction between the physical and the digital. One might say it's electrons at the end of the day but if you think about how we came into this world and how we've operated for a millennia, putting a veil over our eyes to deny the real world is not part of that. It came much later.

Look I'm an engineer like everyone else here. I've grown up on the internet, I've played games consoles since I was a child. I've lost myself to endless hours watching TV, movies, roaming the internet and building software till the odd hours. I'm also closing in on 40 so what I value now is not the same as what I thought was important 20 years ago. Living in some sort of matrix was really appealing back then but as my mortality becomes more apparent I reflect more on our existence and reason for being. In my opinion it's not to defer all of our faculties to a screen strapped to our faces. We are so far from the truth is crazy. But hey we'll keep going in that direction and like all technology there will be the pendulum of extremes and moderation. I will likely not use one of these devices for a long time and only when there's a compelling reason to do so and for limited periods of time. I think that's how all technology should be used, in limited capacity for the betterment of our lives. I do not want to stare at a screen for hours on end anymore and spatial computing is basically taking us further in that direction.

> putting a veil over our eyes to deny the real world is not part of that.

Heh, this is carrying off the conversation in a different direction, but actually your consciousness is already doing that full time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU6LfXNeQM4

Nova- Your Brain: Perception Deception

We really don't see "reality" we see a filtered and limited version of it optimized by evolution to keep us alive on the Serengeti. How useful that actually is in a world that has quickly advanced beyond that point is now the new question.

For example, if we had long term space stations that people were born on, had babies on, and aged and died on, their idea of reality and yours would be significantly different. We define reality by the environment and society around us. Reality doesn't have a fixed value.

This is a separate warning from the LLM/Humanlike agent crowd too. Yuval Noah Harari warns that the battle of the past was attention, the battle of the future will be intimacy.

It's going to be an interesting ride.

I don't agree with his comment, but he does address it:

In other words, there is actually a reason to hope that Meta might win: it seems like we could all do with more connectedness, and less isolation with incredible immersive experiences to dull the pain of loneliness. One wonders, though, if Meta is in fact fighting Apple not just on hardware, but on the overall trend of society; to put it another way, bullishness about the Vision Pro may in fact be a function of being bearish about our capability to meaningfully connect.

Anybody that goes to work alone in a home office room is isolating themselves more completely than sitting in a common area with an XR mask.

But a lot of the demo videos showed people sitting alone wearing the headset, which is even more isolating than both of the above.

Technology certainly isn't a substitute for real human contact, but it's a hard sell to argue that technology is worse than literally being alone.

I, too, share this fear. Most people are already so antisocial these days. We don't need tech making it worse.

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