Hacker News Reader

Comment by landhar | Hacker News Reader

> could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago and seeing everyone hunched over a phone?

True, but I don't recall smartphones ever being unveiled with promotional videos of people all being hunched over them at dinner.

Smartphones were promoted by enabling us to do things on the go: making and receiving phone calls, getting directions, finding restaurants in the area. This is why this feels different: the experience that is promoted is one that feels already slightly dystopian.

View on HN

The iPhone was introduced as having three features:

1. An iPod - that was already isolating people

2. A phone

3. An internet communicator

I’m confused. Are we judging a product category based on how it’s promoted, or how it’s used?

I don’t think my opinion of smartphones would be any different if early promotions had shown the downsides, or bigger upsides, or bizarre and unrealistic scenarios. Am I wrong to be anchored on how they’re actually used, which literally nobody foresaw?

We're judging it based on the vision for how it will be used, as evidenced through its initial promotion.

Do you judge Viagra based on how well it reduces blood pressure?

I agree that demo was dumb and dystopian. But it's silly to latch on to one imagined usage, ignore the others, and have no interest in what the reality will be.

It would be silly to latch onto it, if it were the vision of some random fan, but it is the vision of the company creating the product, so no, it's not silly to consider it critically.

I don't think OP is saying smartphones aren't dystopian in practice, just that no one set out to create the dystopia. That part of the Vision demo showed that the designers thought that this additional contribution to our dystopia was a positive thing, and that's concerning.

Precisely. And you can withness this in sibling threads. For some reason, today some people actually openly desire or pretend to desire the dystopia.

My suspicion is that this is related to the longtermist movement.

I wonder if anyone will feel brave enough to wear this on a bike...

Until the time they're arrested for using a smartphone while biking, or for relying on the computer not to malfunction just to avoid riding blind.

Skiing was what I was wondering.

Specialized AR goggles exist. Not for me but I guess I can understand the appeal to some.

https://ostloong.com/sirius/

Recon Jet made an HMD that is sorta similar to Google Glass, but designed more like ski goggles / sunglasses. One of its use cases when it came out around ten years ago was skiing, but I never used it for that. I mainly used mine biking with its ANT+ integration.

Or driving. It would interesting to have directions overlaid on the view of the road. The exit I need to take could be outlined and highlighted for example.

Until it crashes, and then you crash.

It's not proper AR, It's VR with passthrough which means it's purely active. If it fails it goes black.

I can’t imagine putting a CPU as complicated as the M2 in between my eyeballs and the road. It is too big and complicated.

I guess we don’t really know what the R1 does. It is hypothetically possible that there’s a failsafe road-eyeball path just goes through that chip, maybe that could be made as reliable as various other critical computers…

It's not as failsafe as glass.

I guarantee you Mercedes or Lamborghini would _love_ to have a fully enclosed interior with screens instead of windows, but it's a critical safety feature and anything that makes it less likely to work is just not happening.

We’re basically converging on fully enclosed interiors anyway, just without the VR headset (the pillars for the windows are ridiculous nowadays). Maybe the argument could be made that it’d be safer for everyone (especially pedestrians waiting at crosswalks) if drivers had a headset system.

Getting rid of the windows and making the headset totally necessary seems like riskier proposition though. For the Apple thing on a normal car, the backup option of taking off the headset is always there (assuming sufficient warning can be given before a failure, which is a big assumption, but should be doable).

Drive-by-wire systems exist, so it isn’t as if replacing some normally mechanical steps with electronics is impossible. The electronics just need to be made sufficiently reliable.

Wasn’t there a vampire movie maybe fifteen years ago, where the vampires drove fully enclosed cars via camera during the day? Daybreakers?

There is a separate processing path for the video pass through that is suppose to be distinct from the OS. If one crashes the other shouldn’t.

Yes I know the difference between in theory and practice .

I think that's both inevitable and terrifying.

I'm thinking it might have an onboard battery that affords a few minutes after the current battery is depleted to allow hot swaps.

Not a great solution to using these in such situations, because bugs as you say, but it might be a feature that allows people to feel so daring. Oof.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com