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.
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.