June 6, 2023

The sneering of the wilderness

Why I am so excited about the Vision Pro, and why so many other people aren't.

I normally don't do either hot-off-the-press writing or "tech news" opinions, but the Vision Pro announcement touches something near to my heart and I want to talk about it. No plan here, just writing and seeing where it goes.

I've mentioned before that I don't have a CS degree: in college I did math and physics. When I was 11, I read in _The Physics of Star Trek) that Caltech scientists successfully did teleportation in a lab. As soon as I saw that I stopped wanting to be a game designer and started wanting to be a physicist. There's something ineffably wild about what I'd read, outside the bounds of mundane society, thrilling and terrifying in equal measures. I had to be part of this!

Turns out that The Physics of Star Trek misrepresented the research,¹ actual physics looks nothing like a preteen's imagination, and grad school is scary. So after getting my undergrad degree I moved to SF to get a job as a programmer, because I really liked computers and it paid well. And that was… fine, I guess? I spent two years as a Javascript grunt in a Rails shop which is a pretty good way to burn out anybody's love of programming. I think at one point I threw away my personal computer, that's how little interest in programming I had. There's no wilderness in software.[^software]

And then comes the goddamn Hololens demo!

(Here's a video showing it actually working.)

Holy shit! And it's an actually real thing, it came out in 2016. The Hololens— the possibility of one day owning a Hololens— got me out of my programming slump. Wild magic was in the air again.

I don't want to overstate the importance of the hololens itself. The original viewport was only like 1200x700 and it cost ~$3000. Also, Microsoft has reportedly given up on it, laying off most of the people involved in it. They were never quite able to get something for consumers. But still. They proved this magical, ineffable thing at the boundary of unreality could exist and be sold, and maybe Microsoft would fuck it up but eventually someone would pull it off.

Fortunately between the initial announcement and the crushing disappointment of the layoffs, I matured enough to see the other beautiful wilderness in software, and I stopped following AR developments in 2018.³

Then yesterday Apple announced the Vision Pro. Apple thinks AR is ready.

My droogs, we are in the wilderness.

Techno-pessimism vs tech-sneering

Most people I've read online and talked to are less enthusiastic about the Vision Pro (VP). Three main lines of critique:

1. The device costs $3500, and that's too much!
2. AR will hurt society and isolate us.
3. AR is completely useless and only techbros who want to waste money will waste money on this.

Quickly addressing the first two points:

1. This is the Vision Pro. It's aimed at power users, businesses, and developers. An iPad is $450, an iPad Pro is $800.
2. This is necessary techno-pessimism. All new technology will do good things and bad things to us, and techno-pessimism keeps us honest and grounded.

(3) is the interesting one to me. It goes past techno-pessimism into tech-sneering, dripping with contempt for new tech because "techbros". Tech-sneering is devoid of imagination, creativity or thought. If you can't think of ways to use AR, you don't have an imagination.

Here are seven things I want to do with AR:

1. Scan a painting, place an outline on the wall, see where I need to put the nails to hang it properly.
2. Walk around a city and highlight all the buildings with a Wikipedia article. See how much the houses sold for, overlaid. Navigate the landscape by the strength of wifi signals.
3. Print out academic articles, and then take indexed searchable digital notes on the paper copies.
4. Walk around a blue whale at 1:1 scale and appreciate just how big it is.
5. Put traditional Chinese labels on all the objects around me, let me point to it and hear the Cantonese name.
6. Track the motions of my hands and the flights of juggling balls so I can see exactly what I did wrong in a throw.
7. See what the night sky would look like if we had Saturn's rings. I've seen the pictures, I want to see it in the sky.

And here's five uses I particularly don't care about but imagine would be commercially successful:

1. HUDs. Keep important information on your task at the corner of your vision.
2. Pokemon stadium battles where you point and shout the attack, and then your life-size pokemon makes the attack. Yugioh games with that weird armpiece.
3. Training technology. Rapid iteration on real-life scenarios. This is already happening.
4. Porn.
5. Immersive movies, where you are inside the scene, as it happens around you.

Now you could say that the VP, as it was presented, doesn't have the capabilities to do many of these things, because it doesn't. Then your criticism will be grounded in the reality of it, unlike the mockers. Tech-sneering doesn't care about the details of the technology, what matters is feeling superior to the people who are excited by it. The wilderness is exciting and unknowable, but it's also where the people you dislike like are going.

I've seen the same thing with AI and GPT. You get many pessimists who raise legitimate issues about job displacement and the spread of misinformation, and you also get a whole lot of sneers that AI is just another VC gold rush.

Why did sneering ever get normalized? Maybe it's an over-correction for the last decade of tech messianism. Maybe it's because some ideas, like NFTs and the Metaverse, genuinely deserved to be mocked. Maybe it's always been there, and looking down on people just feels good, and if all our friends are doing it, nobody's going to call us out for being rude.

Anyway, I love the wilderness and am very excited about the announced Vision Pro. One day I'll get to see the rings of Earth.

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