I'm actually super-interested in ways of building those layers of abstractions. Consider tool use. If you've used any tool a lot, you know the feeling of it becoming an extension of yourself. Proficient drivers don't think about moving the keyboard or turning the wheels, they just sort of are the car and will themselves to move where they want to go. As I type this comment, I don't think about my fingers pounding on the keyboard, I just will the words to appear on screen. The brain is good at papering over the mechanics of interacting with the world, and I think it's entirely feasible to start incorporating new senses if our devices can be designed around this purpose, instead of relying on explicitly displaying data for our eyes.
I remember reading about pilots placing an electrode on the tongue and eventually learning to intuitively feel what the external sensor was telling them.
Or another one about a person wearing a belt which always vibrated in the spot facing north. This helped them navigate cities more efficiently after getting accustomed to the vibrations.
Do you have other examples?
The meat of the experience was evaluating the performance of pattern recognition on an array of electrode placed on the tongue.
Before and after training, all subjects underwent evoked potential recordings of their tongue (recodring the EEG following electric stimuly on the tongue).
Being aware of the protocol in advance, during the "before" evoked potential session, I concentrated on my mouth, visualizing it as a place I was sitting in.
I ended up experiencing blue phosphenes (light flashes) sinc'ed with the electric pulses, and my visual cortex was lighting up along with my sensory cortex. That was my first and only proper synesthetic experience (I used to associate vowels and colors as a kid, each vowel clearly mapped to a color, but it was conceptual, not perceptual).
Since I was an outlier (similar evoked potentials were only seen in blind subjects after training), I was excluded from the rest of the study, so I could not experience the complex patterns on the "tongue display unit".
https://www.sciencesquared.eu/sites/default/files/toungue_di...
IIRC, the participants also felt incredibly lost after they had to give back the belt
ML is popular because it’s a set of learning algorithms that we can feed numeric data and output some learned prediction. Once we learn how to feed this numeric data to the brain (similar to the tongue sensor or a haptic vest), then we have the most efficient learning algorithm consuming and making sense of this data!!
People also reported getting a feel for strong EM fields in their surroundings after implanting a small magnet in a finger.
https://www.themystica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Homunc...
This is a proportional representation of touch-sense nerve density in the skin.
Trade-offs though hey. All the highest density areas are probably also the least convenient location for augmented-synesthesia touch-sense devices.
I suspect that, due to the abstraction process you've noted, that it won't be long until the computer is a direct extension of will. Once people start realizing this, I think society is going upend, and a small number of extremely high-output people are going to remake the world.
The Singularity is real, and I think simply obsoleting the mouse and keyboard is going to kick it off. We could even replace screens, but I see it as less of a factor.
It may be the difference between “Refactor > Extract to parameter” and “Find all uses of function. Replace signature with modified signature, setting new parameter to value desired, using parameter from signature instead of local variable”.
When you are a child, you express yourself by constructing words of letters, then sentences of words. What if we’re at the sentence stage right now and the future is expressing ideas as paragraphs all at once.
That would be a shift akin to macros or HKT in programming languages.
That’s what he’s selling. Not the typing. The typing just hurts immersion a little bit.
The prototypical example of this is a magnet implanted in a finger which allows you to sense magnetic fields.
Similarly, I've had people tell me that reading about the "microbiome" is really distressing, since afterwards they feel like they have some alien infestation in their bodies- as though they were full of bugs. On one level they learned a new thing, that healthy human bodies contain lots of various microorganisms, but some part of their psyche still maintained that any such creatures must be pathological. Their obvious health doesn't make them feel like microbiome theory is false, and nor does it fully convince them that their microbiome is benign.
There's probably a lot of more subtle examples of this, and it probably goes a long way to explain why so many people find science to be distressing or depressing.
We also all maintain the perception of "wholeness" of our body. But at the level of microbiome, it's just bunch of cells mixing with another bunch of cells, with different DNA. It's all one large bag of smart sand. It's another realization that may be hard for some people to handle.
Well, in terms of biomass not quite, and our gut flora are also topologically still outside of our bodies. But I agree with the overall sentiment, whether we call it a bag of smart sand or a portable sealed-off climate controlled micro-ecology is just details.
Better not tell them about Demodex spp.
Can you see your eyelash mites?
http://www.optometrytimes.com/dry-eye/demodex-may-be-benefic...
The solution is to just trust your eyes and vision (and by extension, trust the universe at large, if you extend this into the spiritual realm): whatever the exact mechanism of the eyes is, they obviously work well for you. It doesn't make sense to take one small aspect of it (low number of lightbuds) and read too much into it, when its shortcomings are easily abstracted away by for example innate intelligence that scans the environment using those few bulbs, to produce a high-megapixel internal representation which will work well enough! Look at the big picture.
Then I realized your retinas are more like a specialized tongue covered with lightbuds, and my sense of vision changed dramatically. I suddenly had a sense of blindness, that I could see only as far as the tips of the rods and cones in my eye, and everything beyond that was just lining up the photons so they made sense when they arrived.