Behind Eddy Burback’s humorous videos there is an almost brutal irony at play about the world we live in. I don’t know if Burback means it that way or if it just comes out that way, but his videos often play out as a quiet, increasingly bleak observation about our own society. This is never clearer than in his latest video about the Apple Vision Pro where he reviews the new piece of tech and its potential consequences.
Watching the video at first, I thought he was just reviewing the product somewhat facetiously. The Vision Pro is expensive, weighty, brutish, and bulky. The battery life is short, the headset itself is somewhat uncomfortable, and in essence, using the Vision Pro isn’t that much different from using your smartphone. While it isn’t an entirely user-friendly product yet, it hints at a future with a lot of possibilities.
And we could’ve summed up the Vision Pro like this: “It’s a mediocre piece of technology that allows us a glimpse of what it can be.”
In the video, it’s only when Burback puts the Vision Pro down and comes back to it a few days later that the full extent of the possibilities become clear. The glimpse of what it can be is in some ways horrifying. While on its surface, the Vision Pro might be a way to interact with the internet and all the adjacent audiovisual material in a way that allows for us to interact with reality more than your smartphone allows you to do. The Vision Pro is meant as a way to augment how you experience reality, after all. The question is if augmentation is such a good thing.
Of course, it’s undeniably cool to sit on Tatooine while watching Star Wars. What Apple tries to do with the Vision Pro, however, goes much further than that. Virtual reality is one thing. Expecting people to wear your product throughout your entire day is an entirely different thing: You no longer have to miss your favorite show while doing the dishes, doomscrolling was never more immersive, and imagine how much tedium of the world you can avoid on the commute to work.
Robert Nozick’s Thought Experiment
When Burback started to get ads for A.I. companions I got worried. It’s a concept that has been explored before in movies like ‘Bladerunner 2049’ or ‘Her’ where both protagonists fall in love with an an artificial intelligence to evade something in their life they’re not ready to confront. It’s a distraction. If social media asked the question if we could swap social interaction with something easier and less fulfilling, what might the Vision Pro do for genuine affection? Will we dissolve into non-interacting and non-affecting entities?
It reminds me of this thought experiment that Robert Nozick proposed in 1974 in an attempt to refute ethical hedonism. The experiment asks us to imagine a situation in which science has advanced so much that neuroscientists have invented an experience machine that can simulate all manner of experiences for us as long as we plug ourselves into the machine.
“You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in?”1
The thought experiment is meant to ask if there is anything outside our own experiences of what we feel on the inside. After all, if experiencing stimuli or pleasure is all that matters to us, we have no reason not to plug in. In the same way, if you can get enough pleasure from an A.I. companion, we should all want one instead of a real life partner. Yet we recoil at the thought (or at least I hope so).
Nozick cites three reasons for not wanting to be plugged into such a machine:
We want to do certain things. We don’t want to simply be subjected to certain experiences we choose beforehand.
We want to be a certain way and not just an indeterminate body plugged into a machine. There is no way to know what kind of a person someone is when plugged in.
When the machine is man-made, that also means we are only subjected to man-made reality and nothing more. The world loses a quality of worldliness.
In the light of today’s technology, these objections to plugging into the machine sound more like concerns.
Eddy Burback’s Concerns
Burback’s video draws forward similar concerns as Nozick’s experience machine does. Is it okay to have pleasurable experiences as much as possible without regards to what else is there? In a society that’s increasingly less human, this seems like an important question to ask. How does Burback address this question using Nozick’s concerns?
Let’s start with Nozick’s third concern because it’s the most self-evident. Nobody will deny that the Vision Pro’s experiences are limited to what is man made. And while we are most certainly an impressive species in many regards, nature’s design is unmatched. The sense of reality, of being in the world, has been a concern of philosophers for millennia and we should not easily want to give it up for a whole myriad of reasons I won’t get into here. The point is that we might lose an important facet of deeper significance that does seem to mean something to most of us.
Considering the first concern, we can say that the Vision Pro isn’t the same as Nozick’s experience machine because the experiences you get from the Vision Pro are willingly chosen. On top of that, these experiences are meant to enhance ‘outside’ experiences and not to substitute them. You’d be right to argue this way, the Vision Pro is different. Ideally it would be the case that the Vision Pro simply makes life more efficient in some regards, and in a pre-smartphone era I would have been gleefully optimistic about it. If that were the case, Nozick’s first concern wouldn’t hold any weight. It doesn’t take a social scientist, however, to notice that we do more than just use our smartphones for the sake of mere utility. And excessive screentime has been linked to negative effects to executive functioning, sensorimotor development, and academic prospects. Unless we suddenly and collectively know how to limit our screentime to perfectly benefit us, chances are we’ll be completely absorbed by the deluge of information that will be quite literally in front of our eyes.
A similar concern to Nozick’s second is expressed in Burback’s video in a rather subtle way. At one point he meets up with his friend to hang out. Rather than talk with him like he usually does, Burback has his Vision Pro on and looks up information about a sports team he has never really liked so that he can talk with Drew about it (who he knows likes the sports team). While this might not seem very ominous and Burback plays this scene mostly for laughs, it does reveal something about our contemporary behavior in social settings.
Even with our smartphones, we’re quick to look everything up. The whole world at your fingertips… There is so much information. So much that we have little room to be ourselves. A recent movie that addressed this concern in full force was last year’s (oh god it has already been two years) ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ in which the protagonist learns how to travel through the multiverse and can become any version of herself. In the age of the internet we often forget that we can be first and foremost, “here with you.” As humans, Nozick notes, we clearly aspire to be something outside of a body plugged into a machine. We aspire to be courageous, kind, fun to be around, determined and so on. A wealth of information at our fingertips may have helped us embed such character traits faster, but it’s still important to embed them into our character.
Being such and such a way requires effort. It’s the difference between a skilled pianist who can virtually play every song resonantly and in their own style by having practiced the piano for hours since they were twelve, and a person who can play one song really well without ever having learned the ins and outs of hand movements, chords, music theory and so on by following a tutorial on YouTube.2 Or as Burback humorously portrayed it: you can ask A.I. to paint you a painting and display it over your dad’s painting on the wall who has practice for years to perfect his own style. There is a stark difference between the two. A difference we intuitively feel but which we hardly ever have the courage to express.
Burback’s video warns us: there’s more to life than experience. We’re already living through the repercussions of the constant pull of social media, the explosion of the internet, and the unraveling of our attention span. Once upon a time we would’ve been in awe of what Apple has achieved. Today we are left with a sense of impending doom at the potential future the Vision Pro carries with.
Adding to the uncertainties of such a future, we can ask who will be in control of such technology? In Nozick’s example of the experience machine, neuroscientists were responsible for the machine. In our world, the shareholders and CEOs of technological giants are the ones who have vested interest in “plugging us in”. As Burback notes, the solution to the absolute limit of screen time use is to just to glue the screen permanently to your head.
Nozick, Robert. “The Experience Machine.” In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, [Reprint of the] original paperback edition published in 1974, 2013 edition. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2013.
Note that I use the first formulation of the Experience Machine thought experiment and not the one Nozick uses in his later work The Examined Life (1989). This is because the formulation in Anarchy, State and Utopia is more in line with shorter intervals of ‘plugging in’ that is more in line with what the Apple Vision Pro does, whereas the formulation of The Examined Life considers the person plugging in forever. For more information on the difference: https://iep.utm.edu/experience-machine/.
This is similar to a comparison Julia Annas makes between learning a virtue and learning a practical skill. She adjusts the ancient Aristotlean comparison to make it more palatable for a modern audience: Annas, Julia. “Applying Virtue to Ethics.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32, no. 1 (February 2015): pg. 3. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12103.