I spend several thousand dollars testing a few "eyesight for the blind" products by taking video on a head mounted camera, encoding the image as an 1 image per second audio file that is transmitted to the ears. I was actually able to get it to work as advertised, and I believe that given 10 hours a day practice for a month, you could detect a sense of depth perception and make out attributes in your environment through your audio cortex enough to walk around slowly without bumping into things. I had the blind friend test out the best I could do, and although it was a technological marvel, he actually didn't like it because it made people ostracise him even MORE than him being blind. He can move around slowly without bumping into things much more fashionably with the system he already had, a stick, good hearing, touch, and memory.
So a few insights:
1. If you are putting something in front of your eyes, or on your hat brim that looks like a hacked together bunch of cameras and wires and you wear it in public, there is millions of years of evolution causing people to ostracise you. It's so bad, that a blind person told me: "The ostracism from wearing it is worse than the ostracism from them realizing your blind."
2. You think you're confidant and can handle it? You aren't, inside you are millions of years of evolution to remove what is causing the ostracism. If you are the kind of person who can choose to remain single and lonely for life when you burn with passion for the opposite sex, then you have the kind of mettle it takes to wear cameras and wires on your head in public.
3. The experience I had with converting visual to audio and using my audio cortex was tremendous. For example objects that "popped out" at me during audio-vision were completely different than normal vision. Take a brick wall for instance: I could hear the distance between the bricks (cement) was smaller in one spot, and larger in another spot because of an anomalous blip in the audio file. When looking at it visually, you think "meh", it's just a brick wall. With the audio file, the different brick leaps out at you as an anomaly. Thus exposing the data structure/algorithmic differences between the visual cortex and audio cortex.
Doing visual as audio makes you an infant again, the tiniest changes in things leap out as fascinating. This experience I had could probably be sold to people bored to tears with life. A billion dollar idea! Be an infant again.
My intuition is that this is only true insofar as sensory augmentation up to this point has been mostly useless. The reason you don't see delivery people or mechanics or whoever with headgear isn't because it's dorky (although of course it is), but because it just doesn't help that much. We live in a world that has been very well designed for people with the usual basic senses, so adding more on doesn't give you that much more information.[0]
So miniaturization is important, but I think the real improvements to be made are in software. In the coming era, these devices are going to start offering real-world superpowers. People who never forget a face, or where they put their keys, or anything really. People who can have a quiet conversation in a noisy room. People who can do basic computing tasks subconsciously while having a conversation. People with "spider-sense" who never seem surprised by anything.
These tools will still look dorky, but the advantages they offer will be so great that the people who do use them will be very cool regardless.
[0] And I'd augment this claim by noting two examples off the top of my head of people who do use these technologies professionally: surgeons and fighter pilots. Both of those jobs involve doing unfathomably difficult things human beings are incredibly unsuited to do, so they will take every advantage they can get, hang the cost and the aesthetic.
Brainport seems to be the most useful kind of sensory technology available. Giving you the ability to 'see' all kinds of different inputs, such as radar, sonar, UV, vision, balance, etc.
The only problem is that it requires your tongue. And your tongue is where you talk and eat. Once we can overcome this problem, there are huge implications.
I find this really interesting as I built an augmented reality headset that used only sound as output to the wearer as an undergrad project. It tracked the wearers orientation an position as well as using ultrasonic to detect obstacles. It then used 3D audio to convey this information to the wearer. It was built as a framework on top of which multiple applications could be built and three demos that we (I did this project together with another guy) made were: a guidance application that used 3D positioned audio as waypoints; a virtual band playing music so you could walk between the instruments as if the band were playing in the room and finally an application that used the ultrasonic sensor to detect walls. The wall detection would play a number of blips in quick succession and the tempo was relative to the distance to the obstacle. The cool thing was that you could turn your head and get a general sense of the shape of the room by how the blips sped up or slowed down as you scanned along the wall.
Assumedly the implication is that by not succumbing to the social pressure you are demonstrating the required fortitude to choose to also not succumb to a desire for intimacy with other humans, as op states this is an extreme outlier behaviourally speaking, completely regardless of how successful a person may be with human intimacy it's another thing altogether to actually purposely choose to disregard that intense natural urge for intimacy.
TLDR; it's not about not having game, it's about having the guts to tell the entire rest of the world to get fucked, big difference.
To transcend your genetic programming to create more of you takes a kind of self control few people in this world can muster, I don't even think I can do it. The problem is, the moment you achieve it, you immediately remove yourself from the gene pool, so your kids don't have your hardware. However, you do augment the fitness of your collective, as if they were your kids, then your ability to transcend desire to procreate is somewhat selected back into the genome because your presence enables human life (and continued reproduction) where it was previously not possible.
Wearing these electronics in front of your face makes you un-datable, and if you are completely OK with that, then you're a candidate for being a very-early adopter of the next thing that's going to be bigger than the invention of the Internet.
Comments
I spend several thousand dollars testing a few "eyesight for the blind" products by taking video on a head mounted camera, encoding the image as an 1 image per second audio file that is transmitted to the ears. I was actually able to get it to work as advertised, and I believe that given 10 hours a day practice for a month, you could detect a sense of depth perception and make out attributes in your environment through your audio cortex enough to walk around slowly without bumping into things. I had the blind friend test out the best I could do, and although it was a technological marvel, he actually didn't like it because it made people ostracise him even MORE than him being blind. He can move around slowly without bumping into things much more fashionably with the system he already had, a stick, good hearing, touch, and memory.
So a few insights:
1. If you are putting something in front of your eyes, or on your hat brim that looks like a hacked together bunch of cameras and wires and you wear it in public, there is millions of years of evolution causing people to ostracise you. It's so bad, that a blind person told me: "The ostracism from wearing it is worse than the ostracism from them realizing your blind."
2. You think you're confidant and can handle it? You aren't, inside you are millions of years of evolution to remove what is causing the ostracism. If you are the kind of person who can choose to remain single and lonely for life when you burn with passion for the opposite sex, then you have the kind of mettle it takes to wear cameras and wires on your head in public.
3. The experience I had with converting visual to audio and using my audio cortex was tremendous. For example objects that "popped out" at me during audio-vision were completely different than normal vision. Take a brick wall for instance: I could hear the distance between the bricks (cement) was smaller in one spot, and larger in another spot because of an anomalous blip in the audio file. When looking at it visually, you think "meh", it's just a brick wall. With the audio file, the different brick leaps out at you as an anomaly. Thus exposing the data structure/algorithmic differences between the visual cortex and audio cortex.
Doing visual as audio makes you an infant again, the tiniest changes in things leap out as fascinating. This experience I had could probably be sold to people bored to tears with life. A billion dollar idea! Be an infant again.
My intuition is that this is only true insofar as sensory augmentation up to this point has been mostly useless. The reason you don't see delivery people or mechanics or whoever with headgear isn't because it's dorky (although of course it is), but because it just doesn't help that much. We live in a world that has been very well designed for people with the usual basic senses, so adding more on doesn't give you that much more information.[0]
So miniaturization is important, but I think the real improvements to be made are in software. In the coming era, these devices are going to start offering real-world superpowers. People who never forget a face, or where they put their keys, or anything really. People who can have a quiet conversation in a noisy room. People who can do basic computing tasks subconsciously while having a conversation. People with "spider-sense" who never seem surprised by anything.
These tools will still look dorky, but the advantages they offer will be so great that the people who do use them will be very cool regardless.
[0] And I'd augment this claim by noting two examples off the top of my head of people who do use these technologies professionally: surgeons and fighter pilots. Both of those jobs involve doing unfathomably difficult things human beings are incredibly unsuited to do, so they will take every advantage they can get, hang the cost and the aesthetic.
Brainport seems to be the most useful kind of sensory technology available. Giving you the ability to 'see' all kinds of different inputs, such as radar, sonar, UV, vision, balance, etc.
The only problem is that it requires your tongue. And your tongue is where you talk and eat. Once we can overcome this problem, there are huge implications.
I find this really interesting as I built an augmented reality headset that used only sound as output to the wearer as an undergrad project. It tracked the wearers orientation an position as well as using ultrasonic to detect obstacles. It then used 3D audio to convey this information to the wearer. It was built as a framework on top of which multiple applications could be built and three demos that we (I did this project together with another guy) made were: a guidance application that used 3D positioned audio as waypoints; a virtual band playing music so you could walk between the instruments as if the band were playing in the room and finally an application that used the ultrasonic sensor to detect walls. The wall detection would play a number of blips in quick succession and the tempo was relative to the distance to the obstacle. The cool thing was that you could turn your head and get a general sense of the shape of the room by how the blips sped up or slowed down as you scanned along the wall.
>If you are the kind of person who can choose to remain single and lonely for life when you burn with passion for the opposite sex
Who said anything about choosing?
Assumedly the implication is that by not succumbing to the social pressure you are demonstrating the required fortitude to choose to also not succumb to a desire for intimacy with other humans, as op states this is an extreme outlier behaviourally speaking, completely regardless of how successful a person may be with human intimacy it's another thing altogether to actually purposely choose to disregard that intense natural urge for intimacy.
TLDR; it's not about not having game, it's about having the guts to tell the entire rest of the world to get fucked, big difference.
To transcend your genetic programming to create more of you takes a kind of self control few people in this world can muster, I don't even think I can do it. The problem is, the moment you achieve it, you immediately remove yourself from the gene pool, so your kids don't have your hardware. However, you do augment the fitness of your collective, as if they were your kids, then your ability to transcend desire to procreate is somewhat selected back into the genome because your presence enables human life (and continued reproduction) where it was previously not possible.
Wearing these electronics in front of your face makes you un-datable, and if you are completely OK with that, then you're a candidate for being a very-early adopter of the next thing that's going to be bigger than the invention of the Internet.