In Jesus’ parable about good samaritana traveler encounters a man beaten by robbers and left for dead by the side of the road. Moved by pity, the traveler stopped to help, unlike others who had passed him.

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

A 21st century version would have different details. The traveler could switch to an electric bike. After seeing the beaten man, he could call 911 from his cell phone, use GPS to pinpoint their location and warn others on social media about the dangers along that stretch of road. The inn could be paid through Venmo and a crowdfunding platform created to help with the crime victim’s long-term needs. The compassion of the Good Samaritan would be complemented by new technologies.

But whether his listeners live in the 1st or 21st century, Jesus calls all who follow him to imitate the Good Samaritan and to respond with compassion and mercy to the human suffering they encounter throughout the journey of life. Modern technologies can be of great help in this regard. There is, however, a growing danger that certain new technologies will do just the opposite.

Consider headphones and earphones, which in a single survey 47% of users admit they wear “to avoid their environment”. An English writer, Ella Shaw, he was convinced that her always-on headphones helped her focus and made her happy. But after giving them up for a month, she realized she had been using them to block out “the ugliness of the world” – including the homeless people on the street, who she passed “with a spring in her step, completely engulfed in my own audiotopia.”

Through her technology-based cocoon, Shaw experienced what some philosophers call “moral distance“—our feeling less empathic toward those we don’t see, as opposed to those we meet face to face. People far away can seem abstract—less real—leading us to conclude that their needs have less claim on our moral responsibility. Historically, this referred to people separated by time and space. But with headphones and earphones, we can now distance ourselves from those right under our noses.

This is actually a selling point for these devices. Consider Apple’s AirPods, of which there are 150 million pairs were sold since 2016. In promoting its new AirPods Pro 2, Apple he boasted that it prioritizes “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 so they can hear approaching threats, some now wear AirPods to drown cats. Not hearing, or simply pretending not to hear, deprives sex offenders of the attention they seek and makes these women feel safer in public.

But this trust comes at a cost. AirPods’ feelings of security depend on a machine that distances users from the vast majority of harmless people. Including those who need our attention.

However, even if he was deafened by his AirPods, the good Samaritan couldn’t have missed a crime victim in need of help. While Jesus does not mention him crying out 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 paired his AirPods with an Apple Vision Pro — a “smart” headphone that, in words by Commonweal’s Alexander Stern, is essentially a “noise-cancelling headphone for your eyes.”

Vision Pro’s outward-facing cameras mediate the real world to users on a screen that can be overlaid with apps. “Digital content seamlessly blends into your physical space.” bragging about Apple. What’s more, a simple twist of the dial can replace that augmented reality view with a completely virtual one. “I can shape reality to my own specifications,” Stern laments, “and live in a world that’s all mine.” With a Vision Pro, a potential Good Samaritan might overlook a battered and bloody body, distracted by a TikTok video as he walks by, or dismissing it as a hologram.

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

Meta and its partner Microsoft hope that these glasses will be a portal to the “metaverse” — an immersive 3D alternate-reality dream world where there’s plenty of shopping and selling, and people can meet and hang out. Far-flung 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’s “the next evolution of social connection,” Meta’s marketing hype insists. Except not everyone in society will be there to connect.

The metaverse is a retreat from the real world that only those on one side of the digital divide can enter and where residents can spend large sums of cryptocurrency to acquire virtual ‘property’ and collect digital.”art.” While the real world has people living on the fringes, the metaverse has no fringes to live in; there are no people pushed to a digital periphery for a potential Good Samaritan to see. For this to happen, virtual poverty and suffering would need to be introduced intentionally to prevent real poverty and suffering from being forgotten.

Which is exactly what a French nonprofit has done. The Entourage network, which aims to tackle the social exclusion of people from “precarious situations,” created a metaverse avatar named “Will” to represent a person experiencing homelessness. “Will” raises awareness of rough sleepers and projects real-world concerns inside the metaverse so in the words of Entourage Jean-Marc Potdevinwe can “reclaim our own dignity by living a true relationship of communion” with the “invisible and alone, simply ignored.”

Time will tell if the metaverse becomes everything evangelicals dream it will be. But even now other new technologies are making people feel left out—not just those on the fringes of society, but workers whose interactions with peers are minimized by tablets, kiosks, apps, algorithms, and bots. According to the Johns Hopkins University sociologist Allison Pughwhich studies the impact of technology on relationships, this has undermined social cohesion and created a “crisis of depersonalization” where workers feel invisible, leading to burnout and despair.

Given such trends, US Surgeon General insist that we need to “critically assess our relationship with technology” to confront a “public health crisis of loneliness, isolation and disconnection”.

Even technologists are alarmed. Louis Rosenberg, a pioneer of augmented reality (AR), warns that “the metaverse could make reality disappear” and envisions a “dystopian neighborhood walk” with “virtual eyes” on a headset that intentionally hides “soup kitchens and homeless shelters.”

Such a bleak outlook troubles Pope Francis, who in Fratelli Tutti he fears that we are becoming “(p)risoners of a virtual reality” who have “lost the taste and flavor of real reality”. In that encyclical, he also meditates on the good Samaritan, lamenting “the growing chasm between us and the world around us” in which “contempt for the poor is shown” and “one looks the other way”. But now we’re leaning toward a future where we won’t have to look away. Because with our new technology, our vision will already be blocked.

“Christ has no body but yours.” it started Saint Teresa of Avila in a poem widely attributed to her. “Thine are the eyes with which He looks with compassion upon this world… thine are the hands, thine are the feet.”

To be a good Samaritan, Teresa seems to be saying, is to continue serving Jesus himself. That was true in her day; it is true with us. And it may continue to be true tomorrow – as long as our technology allows our eyes to see and our ears to hear.