The Revolution will not be Personalised: OpenAI's Sora, Apple Vision Pro and The End of Democracy

How AI and augmented reality could transform politics

My new training Embodied Sensemaking is now 60% full. For anyone interested in indigenous sovereignty, my friend Kevin Helas has written a piece about the recent Maori ‘hui’ which is worth a read. Also, I have a new piece in Unherd about psychedelic therapy in Ukraine.  

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You wake up at just the right moment in your circadian rhythm, as music inspired by your dreams plays through your alarm clock. Your shower turns on before you get to the bathroom, its temperature synced to data from your Neuralink. You put in your augmented reality lenses and notifications flash on the walls. Your furniture morphs subtly to fit your personalised Vibe Scheme. 

On your way to work, not everyone on the sidewalk makes it past your filters. Some of them have political affiliations you find distasteful. Others have low social credit scores, so they’re removed by default from most lenses. You see them only as moving silhouettes so you don’t bump into them. A notification spreads on the wall of a nearby building: a message from a presidential candidate. A message just for you, AI generated and tailored to the issues you care most about. You look up to the sky and adjust its colour so it’s just right. It’s a good day, because it’s your day. 

This might seem like a scenario from science fiction, but this strange dystopia could be just around the corner. Two major new technologies have hit our newsfeeds recently: Apple’s Vision Pro, and OpenAI’s astonishing new text-to-video product, Sora. Both of these technologies promise to help us create our own versions of reality based on our unique desires. In a post-truth world, they also threaten to bury us ever-deeper in our own subjectivity.

The impact of these technologies on our politics is going to be profound. The impact on our psychology may be even more significant. They represent the next step in a journey toward ever-greater personalisation across society; a quality valued not just by tech companies, but by politicians, educators and healthcare professionals.

Personalisation speaks to a deep-seated belief in capitalist cultures: that our happiness and fulfilment comes from tailoring the world to our desires. Everything, from political beliefs to toothbrushes, is seen to be more valuable when it’s made just for you. And why wouldn’t we want the world to conform to our whims? Why wouldn’t we want to see things just as we want them to be?  

To answer that, we need to probe the limits of subjectivity, and ask what it is we lose when we try to re-paint the sky. We have to explore what kind of society we create when personalisation becomes the norm in politics and our private lives. Ultimately, these are questions that lead us to another: what changes when we stop seeing the world as a place made for us, and instead view ourselves as made for it?