As I write this sentence, Another Girl, Another Planet, The Only Ones’ insouciant, heroin-soaked, pub rock semi-hit from 1978 is rattling through my headphones. I didn’t pick it – though I do love it. Instead, it was chosen from the vast celestial record box by an AI DJ called X, Spotify’s latest innovation to keep users on its streaming platform. X, represented by a pulsing green circle and possessing the voice of a calm, cool, but enthusiastic American, is a revelation. He – no, IT – has access to huge buckets of listening data – not just mine but that of millions upon millions of other listeners – and uses it to make judicious track selections. It is like having the perfect radio station programmed just for you, and it will only get better.
Spotify is far from a benign invention for artists; its rates are brutally low even as the major record companies – themselves early investors in the service – make out like bandits. And, while X is a fun and compelling feature for users, it may be an existential threat to those DJs who still present music shows on linear radio. The AI DJ lacks the topicality and community elements that great radio shows usually feature, but for most people the curatorial genius of the crate-digging ghost in the machine will be enough.
AR could make us into lazy, rude and arrogant pod people
I’m a music obsessive crashing towards early-middle-age and X knows me with frightening ease. A few more songs have passed while I was working, and now Mick Jones and The Clash are serenading me with Lost In The Supermarket. It’s not hard to imagine X tapping into GPS data to provide songs that fit your location – lost in the supermarket, indeed – or having your permission to scan recent texts using sentiment analysis to detect the kind of music that would feed or shift your current mood.
The version of me that used to sit with finger poised over the record button to tape interesting tracks off the John Peel Show on BBC Radio 1 could not have imagined that this technology would be around my lifetime. It would have seemed like a Star Trek dream: an AI assistant that just knows what you like and gives it to you. I turned thirteen in 1997; I turn 40 in January. I mention those milestones not to rub in my relative youth with older readers but to show how technology has advanced in the years I’ve been aware of what’s going on (“Hey Siri, play Marvin Gaye”).
As I write, Apple has just revealed Vision Pro – a headset that allows the wearer to project immersive experiences onto the world around them. It lets you, for example, manipulate documents and images in mid-air in front of you, or drop a cinema screen into any space. It also costs well over £3,000, a fact that’s making many lazy pundits predict it will never catch on.
Similarly ill-informed columnists conflate virtual reality (VR) – computer generated environments in which the creators hope you will be totally sensorily immersed – with augmented reality (AR) – where computer-generated elements that you can interact with are superimposed onto the real world. Apple is dubious about the former and seems to be going all in with the latter. I think it’s the right call.
The worry about Vision Pro’s eye-wateringly high launch price is misplaced. The iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, Apple TV, the MacBook et al all arrived with premium pricing and a sense that only the truly rich could spring for any of them. But then, over time, Apple released more affordable versions and pushed for market dominance and the same will be true of the Vision Pro. The question we should ask is: are we ready for a world of AR visors that will allow the wearer to tap into facial recognition and “remember” us – whether or not we’ve ever met – by pulling up public information about us and having it float in an info box by our heads? Or for socialising to be altered by, say, everyone at a party being able to pull up whatever entertainment or distraction they want on their headset?
As it happens, I think ubiquitous AR could have enormous social, cultural and accessibility benefits, but could also make us into lazy, rude and arrogant pod people. Apple’s commercial for the Vision Pro was vaguely depressing – a procession of beautiful people in beautiful spaces completely ignoring the world unless it was mediated through their headset.
As I reach this paragraph, X has cued up Atlantic Ocean – propulsive power pop from the late and sadly not sufficiently lamented Richard Swift. In it, he sings: “I’m part of the scene / you’re going to drown… I’ve got the right routine / because the end justifies the means.”
AI, AR, and other two-letter tech temptations are not inevitable, but they feel as if they are. We can choose how we incorporate them into our individual lives and into society as a whole. But their creators and marketers will pretend they’re unavoidable: that we must either be “part of the scene” or “drown”. As I tap out those final words, This Year by The Mountain Goats starts playing, with its refrain: “I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me…”. Sometimes music on shuffle feels like a prophecy.
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
