Tech rolls out two revolutions at once

Silicon Valley is hatching new futures faster than the rest of the world can digest them. The artificial-intelligence wave, driven by the astonishing new capacity of AI to mimic human conversation and generate images, is only just coming into view — but Apple sent up an impossible-to-ignore flare: Wait, there's more! With the unveiling of its futuristic headset, the company — which so far has largely sat out the generative-AI explosion — bent a giant new twist in the tech-industry storyline. Tim Cook's Apple had waited years to show the world its next big bet after the iPhone, the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro satisfies a public hunger for tech goods that have some tangibility. Of course, we're also going to have lots of debates over the Vision Pro's human impact: Does it further isolate us? Will it deepen inequality? Does it give you a headache? Both AI and Apple's computer-on-your-face are well-positioned to make big waves for many years to come — unlike some other recent contenders for "the next platform."