Vision Pro – death by meme

6th February 2024

Sam Volkering

Feb 06, 2024

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

A cartoonish, slightly exaggerated depiction of an overweight person driving a car. The person is wearing futuristic goggles, similar to the concept of Apple's Vision Pro goggles, with sleek and modern design elements. The interior of the car is visible, showing a steering wheel, dashboard, and the road ahead through the windshield. The person has a cheerful expression, illustrating a sense of enjoyment and engagement with the driving experience. The overall tone of the image is lighthearted and fun, with bright colors and a focus on the interaction between technology and everyday life.

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

How ridiculous is the future?
Deepfakery costs a lot
Jesus swims

If that’s enough to get the vision augmenting, read on…

AI Collision 💥 Vision Pro destined to meme into the future

Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the “algorithms” corrupting my life.

But right now, my entire social media experience is populated with Apple Vision Pro content.

For some reason, all things relating to AI have taken a deep back seat to videos of people using computer screens in the “spatial computing” world.

Then again, there’s a very high likelihood that we’ll find technologies like spatial computing and AI coverage into one.

Of course you’re familiar with AI, but what do we mean when we say “spatial computing”?

Spatial computing is just tech that combines the physical world with digital or virtual elements.

I prefer the term augmented reality, but in honesty, it’s just your real world combining with computer-generated data.

What we’re seeing now with a very hyped-up consumer device like Vision Pro is how this applies in your day-to-day life.

That means devices that have spatial computing built-in understand the layout of the world around you. They see and know where the walls, furniture or other people are, so the digital objects don't just float through solid things but exist “on top”.

Where things get wild is when it’s not just about seeing virtual objects in your space. Spatial computing lets you manipulate these objects as if they were real. You could play a virtual piano appearing in your room or rearrange virtual furniture before buying real ones.

In short, spatial computing is all about a seamless interaction between our physical environment and digital information, making it possible to interact with virtual elements in a real-world context.

Now, already I’ve seen some prototype AI-enabled applications using spatial computing. And it’s great. In fact, it’s most definitely the future of what will make any computing powerful. The integration of AI into computing, which we’re seeing more and more of already, is a given.

The big question is the form factor and implementation of spatial computing…

Is it really the future? And is all the hype we’re seeing justified, or are we still a half-decade too early?

Well, my take is that we’re still early. Form and function are not in perfect harmony yet. The tech is powerful, and the idea of spatial computing is a certainty, but as you’ll see in a minute, it’s too much on the balance of ridiculousness to be a real “iPhone moment” in terms of the next big step in computing.

With all that considered, spatial computing is important, and as AI finds its way into spatial computing applications, we’ll unlock some real potential in industry and in the home – but just not yet.

And that’s why I’ve decided today to explain how tech fails by meme.

That’s right. You can almost predict the success of a technology today by the balance of positive vs mockery in memes.

Now it might seem facetious to think that memes do anything to the success of anything, but it’s an important factor in assessing technology, companies and investments today. Sit on the wrong side of the meme game and you’ll quickly find yourself in a downward spiral.

That’s why the top five memes for Apple’s Vision Pro are telling me that this is great tech, but it will ultimately not be the iPhone of this generation… at least not yet.

This one comes with the text,

“Apple Vision Pro buyers be like…”

AI gone wild 🤪

I’ve been covering AI-generated deepfakes here for a while now. Even just last week, I wrote about the troubles Taylor Swift was having with her own vile deepfakes on X.com.

Well, as I correctly pointed out, that wasn’t going to be the last time deepfakes hit the news streams.

Literally the next day, this is a headline in the news:

So apparently it wasn’t just the CFO who was deepfaked. It was the entire Zoom call.

They deepfaked a whole bunch of the worker’s colleagues.

This takes preventative security to a whole new level. Now, you can’t even trust that who you’re speaking to is actually who you’re speaking to.

Where does this leave the future of digital online communications?

I’m not really sure. On one hand, it definitely opens up an opportunity for AI security – some kind of AI-proof verification system to ensure we are all who we say we are.

But on the other hand, it also lends itself back to good old-fashioned, in-person communication.

Is that winding back technology though? Or just circumventing it? I don’t think humanity has ever wound back tech. So, I’d reason that rather than a shift backwards, we’ll see a greater opportunity and prevalence of AI-proof security.

It’s something I’m definitely keeping an eye out for as the deepfake problem becomes a bigger and clearly more expensive problem.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

man in black suit jacket and black pants figurine

Boom 📈

Symbotic (NASDAQ:SYM) up 23%
Wearable Devices (NASDAQ:WLDS) up 12%
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) up 8%

Bust 📉

Cyngn (NASDAQ:CYN) down 26%
iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) down 23%
Teradyne (NASDAQ:TER) down 8%

From the hive mind 🧠

Living in Portugal, it’s clear there’s been an influx of “tech” people here in the last few years. But what’s interesting is that AI is predicted to add €61 billion to the domestic economy.
I’ve played around with Google’s AI applications for a while. But I know not many people know or realise what’s available to them, so here’s a full list of what you can do with Google AI.
I really hope that AI isn’t used for weird dystopian stuff. The kind of thing that makes us recoil and say, “Eww, that’s weird.” But then China goes and does this.

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️ the results show

Last week was a little different for the weekly poll.

I asked what were your biggest fears and worries in investing right now. It was an open question, so I’m going through all the answers to see if there are common themes that AI Collision can explore further here and also through the other publications at Southbank Investment Research.

So, thanks for taking the time to reply to that. And if you missed it, there’s still time to reply and there’s no deadline on answering it, so you can head here to the post to give me your thoughts.

But I did also ask another question last week:

Do you consider Neuralink to be AI?

Here’s the results…