This episode focuses on the our coming Augmented Reality dystopia.

Image from HYPER-REALITY (2016), by Keiichi Matsuda.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

TRANSCRIPT (Not exact)

This episode is a followup to a previous episode, on the Simulation Hypothesis. You don’t need to listen to that episode first, but I’d recommend it. It’s a good episode. Among other ideas, I present a way that, even if the world outside us right now is 100% real, even if we don’t live inside anything like a computer simulation, there are forces that will push us to build an all encompassing simulated world, or some kind of virtual overlay to our existing world, and it will almost certainly be driven forward by a desire to control and manipulate.

This episode is a continuation of that idea, and so far as I can tell this potential future is nearly inevitable and almost certainly nightmarish, at least from the perspective of the individual autonomy.

In short, we are headed to an AR dystopia, and there’s no getting around that.

AR stands for Augmented Reality. VR blocks 100% of your view and replaces it with a screen. AR is the much more transformative, and challenging, technology. With AR, you are still looking at the world in front of you, but there’s another layer of information that’s digitally overlayed on top of it. So for example, you may be playing Pokémon, and you see little creatures when you look at your phone’s screen, and those creatures appear to be part of the actual world. They are digitally embedded in it.

Ideally, from a tech standpoint, AR isn’t done with your phone, it’s done with glasses or a beam that shoots pixels right into your eye or even a neurological implant. It’s done is a way that you don’t have to think about it, your vision has been enhanced, and you rarely have to spend time fiddling with the settings or device.

Because AR doesn’t completely cover up your view of the world, it can be an always-on solution. The idea is not to completely surround you in the way that VR does and create a completely synthetic world, the idea is to integrate the real world with this other virtual information.

Imagine for a moment some of the possibilities that open up with AR. A construction worker walking through a building might see every pipe labeled with its function and if it’s been hooked up. They might see walls project in front of them exactly were they need to be built. A company might use it along with face recognition so that you see the name and job title of everyone who passes you in the hallway. It might be vital in emergency medical situations, for example if a lady with a dangerous boyfriend has just overdosed on your narcotics and you need precise instructions on how to plunge a syringe full of adrenaline right into her heart. AR could project a circular bull-eye to just the right location and show you an animation of how to drive in the needle.

So clearly there are some beautiful applications here, and I’ll talk more about those application, but for now let's take a look at what might go wrong with AR, and in particular how this beautiful technology is almost certain to lead us down a wildly dystopian path. I could speculate endlessly about the exact shape this dystopia will take, but instead let's start with what is going to happen for sure, based on what we already know about the world and human beings.

If you think about the wold’s most expensive ad spaces, you might think about a commercial during the super bowl or a billboard in Times square. Those are indeed valuable places to show an ad, but in the end the answer to the question, where is the best place to show an ad is, in people’s field of vision. And when is the best time to show someone an ad? When they are mostly likely to act on it.