Is AI going the same way as VR?
Artificial Intelligence is a topic that we can see more and moe often everywhere around us. Just a few days ago one of the largest computers producer Apple introduced their new operation system and new hardware machines, that together are supposed to open a new era of Artificial Intelligence. Just time will tell how successful will be this effort. Or should we better say – how ‘dangerous’ it will be?
Based on the recent article by Ted Gioia aptly named How Virtual Reality Died, we shouldn’t be too worried. In his typical way, Ted is here poking fun at the largest tech companies, namely Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
Based on the article, it has been three years in October, since Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company from Facebook to Meta, planning to introduce humanity to the virtual reality of his metaverse. Some $20 Billion later, normal people still don’t plan to this fake world.
And quite similar story has written Microsoft with their investment of $5 Billion in Hololens technology, Apple with their Vision Pro headset, or Google Glass. Neither of these atempts to relieve us from our mundane reality and instead enjoy the excitment of the virtual one, seems to be successful.
It is really clever, how Ted Gioia compares the Virtual Reality with the Artificial Intelligence. He writes:
These same four companies—Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google—have a new dream technology built on fakery. It’s called artificial intelligence.
But their AI plans aren’t much different than the virtual reality debacle.
– In VR, we go into a fake world to interact with real people.
– In AI, we remain in the real world but interact with fake people.
This looks interesting. But is it so simple?
That is literally a ‘One Trillion Dollars Question’! Based on the article, there is an estimated investment of one Trillion Dollars going into the Artificial Intelligence.
But if we look no further than this year’s Nobel Prize winners, things get more complex. On one side, there are MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on how institutions shape economic outcomes. Their research suggests that technology, including AI, could widen inequality if not managed carefully. On the other side is the ‘godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his foundational contributions to machine learning. Hinton’s work has enabled AI systems to learn and adapt in ways previously thought impossible, but he has also warned about the risks of unchecked AI development.
This duality—promise versus peril—makes the comparison between AI and VR less straightforward than Gioia suggests. VR’s failure, so far, stems from its inability to deliver a compelling, accessible experience that justifies its cost and hype. The headsets are clunky, the applications niche, and the metaverse feels like a solution in search of a problem. AI, however, is different. It’s not just about creating a new environment; it’s about enhancing the one we already inhabit. AI is already embedded in our daily lives—think of recommendation algorithms on streaming platforms, voice assistants like Siri, or predictive text on your phone. Unlike VR, which requires users to opt in to a new reality, AI meets people where they are.
Still, Gioia’s skepticism isn’t entirely misplaced. The tech giants have a track record of overpromising and underdelivering, and AI is not immune to this. The trillion-dollar investment in AI—spanning everything from chip development to massive data centers—raises questions about whether the returns will match the hype. Will AI become another expensive tech fad, like VR, or will it fundamentally transform our world?
The answer lies in how we approach it. The Nobel Prize winners highlight both the potential and the pitfalls. Acemoglu and Johnson remind us that AI’s economic impact depends on how society manages its integration—whether it concentrates wealth and power or creates widespread opportunity. Hinton’s work shows AI’s incredible capacity to solve complex problems, from medical diagnostics to climate modeling, but also underscores the need for ethical guardrails.
If done right, AI can help humanity a lot. Imagine AI accelerating scientific discoveries, improving healthcare access through accurate diagnostics, or optimizing energy use to combat climate change. Unlike VR, which struggled to find practical applications, AI has already shown it can deliver real-world value when guided by human priorities. The challenge is ensuring it serves the many, not just the few. While VR’s story may be one of unfulfilled promises, AI’s story is still being written—and with the right choices, it could be a story of progress, not peril.
I will finish this with a quote from the book The Human Condition, which Hannah Arendt wrote almost seventy years ago in 1958:
Needless to say, this does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities or is on the point of losing them. No matter what sociology, psychology, and anthropology will tell us about the “social animal,” men persist in making, fabricating, and building, although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist, so that the concomitant experiences of worldliness escape more and more the range of ordinary human experience. Similarly, the capacity for action, at least in the sense of the releasing of processes, is still with us, although it has become the exclusive prerogative of the scientists, who have enlarged the realm of human affairs to the point of extinguishing the time-honored protective dividing line between nature and the human world.
Image by Grok
