Out of sight, out of mind: The Good Samaritan confronts new technologies

In Jesus’ parable about good SamaritanA traveler meets a man on the side of the road, beaten by robbers and left for dead. Touched by pity, the traveler stopped to help, unlike others who passed by him.

According to Jesus, this is very much a first-century story: a traveler rode a donkey, poured oil and wine on the wounds of a wounded man, and paid an innkeeper with a handful of coins to look after him.

The 21st century version will have different details. A traveler can pass by on an e-bike. After seeing the beaten man, he could call 911 on his cell phone, use GPS to pinpoint their location and warn others on social media about the dangers along that stretch of road. The innkeeper can be paid through Venmo, as well as through a crowdfunding platform created to meet the long-term needs of a crime victim. The compassion of the Good Samaritan will be complemented by new technologies.

But whether his listeners live in the first century or the 21st century, Jesus calls all who follow him to imitate the Good Samaritan and respond with compassion and mercy to the human suffering they encounter in life’s journey. Modern technologies can help with this. However, there is a growing danger that some new technologies may lead to the exact opposite result.

Let’s look at headphones and earbuds that… one poll 47% of users admit to wearing clothes “to avoid the environment.” One English writer Ella Shaw was convinced that her headphones always on helped her focus and made her happy. But after she gave them up for a month, she realized she was using them to block out “the ugliness of the world,” including homeless people on the street whom she walked past “with a spring in her step, fully engulfed in my own audiotopia.”

Through her technological cocoon, Shaw experienced what some philosophers call “moral distance“—we feel less empathetic towards those we cannot see, as opposed to those we meet face to face. People far away may seem abstract—less real—leading us to conclude that their needs have less impact on our moral responsibility. Historically, it referred to people separated by time and space. But with the help of in-ear headphones, we can now distance ourselves from those who are right under our noses.

This is actually an argument in favor of these devices. Take Apple’s AirPods, for example, of which there are 150 million pairs. were sold since 2016. While promoting its new AirPods Pro 2, Apple boasts that they prioritize “the sounds that demand your attention as you move through the world” while eliminating “unwanted noise.”

There is some benefit to this. While women have long been warned not to wear headphones to hear approaching threats, some are now wearing AirPods to silence calls. Not hearing, or simply pretending not to hear, deprives sex critics of the attention they seek and allows these women to feel safer in public.

But this confidence comes at a price. The feeling of safety from AirPods relies on the device distancing users from the vast majority of people who pose no threat. Including those that need our attention.

But even if a good Samaritan were stunned by AirPods, he still wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing a crime victim in need of help. Although Jesus does not mention that he screamed or moaned in pain, the half-dead man lying on the side of the road in the empty desert was impossible to miss. Unless, perhaps, a good Samaritan paired his AirPods with the Apple Vision Pro, a smart headset that… in words Commonweal’s Alexandra Stern is essentially “noise-canceling headphones for your eyes.”

Vision Pro’s outward-facing cameras provide users with the real world on a screen on which applications can be overlaid. “Digital content blends seamlessly with your physical space.” boasts Apple. Moreover, a simple turn of the control knob can replace an enhanced view of reality with a completely virtual one. “I can shape reality to my own specifications,” Stern laments, “and live in a world that is all mine.” With Vision Pro, a potential good Samaritan might miss a beaten and bloody body, get distracted by a TikTok video while walking by, or mistake it for a hologram.

For now, VisionPro’s hardware is clunky and expensive, but as Stern warns, it heralds a “dark future” in which the lines between the real and the virtual are forever blurred in private techno bubbles. Along with Apple, Snap, Google and Microsoft compete with each other to develop competing products; even smart contact lenses are in work. And Facebook’s parent company Meta invested billions to create what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls The “holy grail” of smart glasses that will “redefine our relationship with technology.”

Meta and its partner Microsoft hope that these glasses will become a portal to the “metaverse” – an immersive 3D dream world in an alternate reality where a lot of buying and selling takes place and people can meet and hang out. Distant friends can play games together as if they were in the same room, or attend a virtual concert that is digitally as close to the real thing as possible. It’s “the next evolution of social connections,” Meta’s marketing hype claims. Except that not all members of society will be contactable.

The Metaverse is a retreat from the real world, where only those on one side of the digital divide can enter, and where residents can spend large amounts of cryptocurrency to purchase virtual “property” and accumulate digital information.art“While in the real world there are people who live on the outskirts, in the metaverse there are no edges for them to live on; there are no people pushed to the digital fringe for a potential good Samaritan to see. It will take virtual poverty and suffering for this to happen.” be inserted deliberately to prevent the real poverty and suffering from being forgotten.

That’s exactly what one French non-profit organization did. Entourage a network that seeks to solve the problem of social isolation of people in “dangerous situationscreated a metaverse avatar named “Will” to portray a person experiencing homelessness. “Will” raises awareness about rough sleeping and reflects real world issues. inside the metaverse So, according to Entourage Jean-Marc Potdevinwe can “restore our own dignity by living in true relationships of communion” with those who are “invisible and alone, simply ignored.”

Time will tell whether the metaverse will become what its evangelists dream of. But even now, other new technologies are making people feel left out—not just those on the margins of society, but also workers whose interactions with others are minimized by tablets, kiosks, apps, algorithms, and robots. According to a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University Allison Pughstudying the impact of technology on relationships, it has undermined social cohesion and created a “crisis of depersonalization” in which workers feel invisible, leading to burnout and despair.

It is in view of these trends that the US Surgeon General insists that we must “take a critical look at our relationship with technology” to confront “the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation and lack of connection.”

Even technologists are alarmed. Louis Rosenberg, pioneer of augmented reality (AR), warns that “the metaverse can make reality disappear” and is a “dystopian stroll through the neighborhood” with “virtual blinders” on the headset deliberately hiding “soup kitchens and homeless shelters” from view.

This grim prospect worries Pope Francis, who Fratelli Tutti fears that we are becoming “(p)prisoners of virtual reality” who have “lost the taste and aroma of true reality.” In this encyclical, he also reflects on the Good Samaritan, lamenting the “growing gulf between us and the world around us,” which “reveals contempt for the poor” and “looks the other way.” But now we are moving towards a future where we don’t have to look the other way. Because with our new technology our vision will already be blocked.

“Christ has no body but yours.” started Saint Teresa of Avila in a poem widely attributed to her. “Your eyes, with which He looks compassionately at this world… Your hands, your feet.”

To be a Good Samaritan, Teresa says, is to continue the ministry of Jesus himself. This was true in her time; this is true in ours. And this can continue tomorrow – as long as our technology allows our eyes to see and allows our ears to hear.