Is the Apple Vision Pro bringing "non-essential" technology?

There was a very classic photo at the 2016 Samsung press conference, that is, the audience wore Samsung Gear VR glasses, and Zuckerberg walked by them, but everyone was unaware. Doesn't that sound a little paranoid? Zuckerberg's stunning walk among unsuspecting ordinary people is creepy, and even the smile on his face is interpreted as creepy. Many voices on social media are asking whether this is a parable for the future of humanity. People are immersed in a virtual world, and the people who lead us quietly walk by us? In any case, people are already glued to the world of mobile phones and laptops, and may continue to indulge in the world of AR/VR glasses in the future.

Yin Qinglu: This is also very similar to noise cancelling headphones, noise cancelling at the same time also cut off the natural birdsong and human voice, the so-called "transparent mode" is only to let you hear the minimum car horn or airport announcement, just like the "exquisite" design of Vision Pro - when a friend walks in front of you, he will break through the restrictions of the virtual picture and greet your eyes. But the real world at this time is also artificial, is purely functional.

Poor people are more likely to be immersed in virtual worlds, and technology cannot be divorced from physical objects

Pan Wenjie: In the future, MR (Mixed Reality) glasses should be transparent, like Ami Mizuno's glasses, at least it will look normal, and the most important thing is of course that people should maintain a connection with the real world. In fact, the more poor people are, the more likely they are to be immersed in the virtual world for a long time and lose contact with the real world.

In "Can't Stop: How to Break Behavioral Addictions in the Age of Scrolling," Adam Alter, a PhD psychologist at Princeton University, sees how those who produce and design high-tech products seem to abide by the number one rule of the drug trade: They must not become addicted. Mr. Jobs's children never used ipads, the Twitter founder didn't buy tablets for his two sons, game designers shunned World of Warcraft, and many Silicon Valley giants kept their children away from electronic devices at all. "It's like religious leaders not allowing children to participate in religious activities."

Yoo Hyun-joon, an architecture professor at Hongik University, said, The more you live in a narrow house, the more time you spend watching TV. The more crowded the subway, the more time I spend watching Netflix. In some ways, people with lower incomes are gradually being pushed into the online space." For people living in confined Spaces, as the offline space shrinks, the void will be filled by the online space. "Enjoying nature and having a lot of space, at some point, may become the preserve of the rich." It can be said that behind Zuckerberg's photo, there is an implicit concern that new technologies are exacerbating class divisions.

The Internet, artificial intelligence, these high-tech always give us an illusion, innovation is very light, wealth like alchemy's magic as from nothing, but in fact it can not be separated from the support of the material entity, the fact that it actually covers up some inequality. These two days read "Fulfilling orders: Everything and Nothing touched on a topic I had never thought about before, and I was struck by the fact that everything we do on the Internet today -- texting, shopping online, streaming music and movies, and in the near future, jumping into the digital world with Vision Pro headsets -- all rely on huge servers. These servers are located in huge data centers that create few jobs (20 engineers and technicians are needed to operate a data center that covers more than 200,000 square feet) but require a lot of electricity and water to run and cool the machines.

In 2018, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook spent a combined $77 billion on capital expenditures, mostly to build and maintain data centers. Many machines last only a few years, meaning that the boom in data centre construction is accompanied by a lot of waste. At the same time, much of the energy needed to operate data centers comes from non-renewable sources, such as coal. Only 12 percent of the energy consumed in Amazon's data centers comes from renewable energy, which is behind Microsoft and Facebook but ahead of Google. Nationwide, for every $1 billion spent to build a data center, $7 billion in electricity is consumed over 20 years.

Even more surprising is that Jeff Bezos is quite dismissive of energy consumption - he is, according to the author, a dyed-in free-marketeer with no regard for "corporate social responsibility" - in his view, the Earth will run out of energy sooner or later, which is why we need to go to the moon. And if that ever happens, guess who gets a pass to the moon?

Xu Luqing: It reminds me that when ChatGPT4 was first launched, The Times published a story investigating the situation of low-wage workers behind OpenAl. To ensure that the final output of ChatGPT is standardized and civilized, a large number of artificial training AI is required, and they are generally outsourced workers with low pay and lack of security. According to the report, OpenAl hired tens of thousands of Kenyan contractors at $1.32 an hour to review the content, and many of the workers developed PTSD, depression, anxiety and other psychological problems, insomnia and nightmares as a result of their prolonged exposure to the shocking filthiness.