Out of sight, out of mind: the Good Samaritan is confronted with new technology

In Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritana traveler encounters a man who has been beaten by robbers and left for dead along the road. Moved with compassion, the traveler stopped to help, unlike others who had passed him.

In Jesus’ story, it is a first-century story: the traveler rode on a donkey, poured oil and wine on the wounded man’s wounds, and paid an innkeeper with a handful of coins to care for him.

A 21st century version would have different details. Maybe the traveler zooms by on an e-bike. When he saw the beaten man, he was able to call 911 on his cell phone, use GPS to pinpoint their location and warn others on social media of the dangers along that stretch of road. The innkeeper can be paid through Venmo and a crowdfunding platform set up to help with the long-term needs of the crime victim. The Good Samaritan’s compassion would be supplemented by new technology.

But regardless of whether His listeners live in the first 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 on their life’s journey. Modern technologies can be of great help here. However, there is a growing danger that some new technologies will do exactly the opposite.

Think of headphones and earplugs, which in one survey 47% of users admit to ‘avoiding their environment’. One English writer, Ella Shaw, was convinced that her always-on headphones helped her focus and kept her happy. But after giving them up for a month, she realized she was using them to shut out “the ugliness of the world” — including homeless people on the streets, whom she would walk past “with a spring in my step, completely engulfed through my own audiotopia.”

Through her technology-enabled cocoon, Shaw experienced what some philosophersmoral distance“- our feeling of being less empathetic towards those we cannot see, as opposed to those we encounter face to face. People far away can seem abstract – less real – leading us to conclude that their needs are less of a claim on our moral responsibility. Historically, this refers to people separated by time and space. But with headphones and earbuds we can now distance ourselves from those right under our noses.

This is actually a selling point for these devices. Think of Apple’s AirPods, of which 150 million pairs have been sold since 2016. In promoting its new AirPods Pro 2, Apple shows off that they prioritize “sounds that need your attention as you move through the world” while eliminating “unwanted noise.”

This has some advantage. While women have long been warned not to wear headphones so they can hear impending threats, some are now wearing AirPods drown out the catcallers. Not hearing, or simply giving the impression of not hearing, deprives sexual troublemakers of the attention they seek and makes these women feel safer in public.

But this trust comes at a price. AirPods’ sense of security depends on a machine that distances users from the vast majority of people who pose no danger. Including those who need our attention.

But even while numbed by the AirPods, the Good Samaritan couldn’t help but see a crime victim in need of help. Although Jesus does not mention him screaming or groaning in pain, a half-dead man lying by the side of the road in the empty desert would have been impossible to miss. Unless perhaps the Good Samaritan had paired his AirPods with an Apple Vision Pro – a ‘smart’ headset that, in the words by Commonweal’s Alexander Stern, is essentially “noise-cancelling headphones for your eyes.”

The Vision Pro’s outward-facing cameras bring the real world to users on a screen that can be overlaid with apps. “Digital content fits seamlessly into your physical space,” shows off Apple. In fact, a simple turn of the dial can replace that expansive view of reality with a completely virtual one. “I can shape reality to my own wishes,” Stern laments, “and live in a world that is mine alone.” With a Vision Pro, a would-be Good Samaritan can overlook a beaten and bloodied body while passing through a TikTok video, or dismiss it as a hologram.

For now, VisionPro’s hardware is clunky and expensive, but as Stern warns, it portends a “dark future” in which the lines between real and virtual are forever blurred in private technobubbles. Along with Apple, Snap, Google and Microsoft are racing each other to develop competing products; even “smart” contact lenses are in the making. And Facebook’s parent company Meta has invested billions in creating CEO Mark Zuckerberg to call to action the ‘holy grail’ of smart glasses that will ‘redefine our relationship with technology’.

Meta and its partner Microsoft heap that these glasses will be a gateway to the ‘metaverse’ – an immersive 3D alternate reality dream world where lots 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 digitally approximates the real thing. It is the ‘next evolution in social connection’, Meta’s marketing hype emphasizes. Only not everyone in society will be there to connect.

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 sums of cryptocurrency to purchase virtual “properties” and collect digital “properties.”artWhile in the real world people live on the edges, the metaverse has no margins to inhabit; there are no people pushed to the digital periphery for a potential Good Samaritan to see. To achieve that would require virtual poverty and suffering. deliberately inserted to prevent real poverty and suffering from being forgotten.

That’s exactly what a French non-profit organization has done. The Entourage network, which promotes the social exclusion of people in “precarious situations,” created a metaverse avatar named “Shall” to represent a person who is homeless. “Will” raises awareness about people sleeping on the streets and projects real-world concerns within the metaverse so, in the words of Entourage Jean-Marc Potdevinwe can ‘reclaim our own dignity by maintaining a true community relationship’ with those who are ‘invisible and alone, simply ignored’.

Only time will tell if the metaverse will be everything the evangelists dream of. But even now, other new technologies are making people feel overlooked—not just those on the margins of society, but also workers whose interactions with fellow humans are minimized by tablets, kiosks, apps, algorithms, and robots. According to the sociologist from Johns Hopkins University Allison Pughwho studies the impact of technology on relationships, this has undermined social cohesion and created a ‘depersonalization crisis’ in which employees feel unseen, leading to burnout and despair.

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

Even technologists are worried. Louis Rosenberg, a pioneer in the field of augmented reality (AR), warns that “the metaverse could make reality disappear” and imagines a “dystopian walk through the neighborhood” with “virtual blinders” on headphones that deliberately obscure “soup kitchens and homeless shelters.”

Such a bleak prospect worries Pope Francis Fratelli Tutti fears that we are becoming ‘(p)risoners of a virtual reality’ who have ‘lost the taste and taste of the actually real’. In that encyclical he also meditates on the Good Samaritan, lamenting the “growing gap between ourselves and the world around us” in which “contempt is shown for the poor” and “people look the other way.” But now we’re ambling toward 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 St. Teresa of Avila in a poem commonly attributed to her. “Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassionately upon this world…Yours are the hands, yours are the feet.”

Being a Good Samaritan, Teresa seems to say, means continuing the ministry of Jesus himself. That was true in her day; it is true in ours. And it may remain that way tomorrow – as long as our technology allows our eyes to see and our ears to hear.