If you’ve been to see a doctor in the last few years, you’ve probably had this experience: at some point, the doctor will ask a series of questions. And instead of on you, all attention is on the computer screen. The space between the questions is filled only with the click of the mouse and the clack of the keyboard.

As a patient, this experience can be a little awkward. But for a provider, this interruption of care is extremely frustrating. The provider is caught between two competing needs: the need to document in a digital system so that the information is accessible wherever the patient needs care, and the need to be present and available to the patient. It’s a struggle that takes place whenever the physical must transition to the digital; it takes time and attention to capture the world in the discrete, structured form that best suits analysis, sharing, and retrieval.

Luckily, some of the most exciting advances in digital technology are helping us to chip away at this barrier. For many years, there has been little change in the fundamental tasks we have assigned to computers. We want computers to store our information, to perform transformations or calculations on the information, and to transmit information from one person or system to another. While computers have improved many thousand-fold in their ability to perform these tasks, the nature of the work is much the same. It is how we are interacting with computers as they perform these tasks that is changing completely.

For decades, we have trained people to abstract the analog world so that it is fit for digital consumption. This is required for programmers, data entry specialists, and digital modelers, but also anyone who spends time interacting with computers to work or communicate — which includes anyone reading this article. But a host of new technologies are allowing the digital interface to fade into the background, so we can connect people, ideas, and information without barrier.

Some of these technologies are focused on bringing the digital world out into the physical. Augmented reality puts information and graphics where they are most useful to the user — adjacent to and overlaying the field of view. Rather than pulling away attention, these systems become a secondary layer of information that can enhance the task of interaction. 

Other systems do even more to remain in the background. Recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning allow digital systems to engage in conversation with their users. Speech recognition is now accurate enough to make this interaction hands free — no typing is required. And the technologies powering these interfaces aren’t just clever tricks to make the system seem more personable: they are able to break down the unstructured input into useful, structured data. 

So while we used to train people to filter the world down to a digital representation, we can now train machine systems. The machine systems, unlike their human counterparts, can be infinitely duplicated and deployed. Training only needs to be done once to benefit millions of users. Already today we are seeing top artificial intelligence companies provide access to their pre-trained systems through public APIs, which makes it possible for this technology to live everywhere that people and computers interact.

What is happening is not a surrender of human expertise to computers. It is the long-awaited maturation of a technology that has been incredibly useful, while simultaneously a pain in the neck. We are seeing vast improvements in computer systems that can operate fully in our world, rather than requiring a dedicated digital space. We are seeing systems that can complement our work rather than pull us away from it.

The benefits of these interfaces will manifest in their absence, rather than their presence. Monitors, keyboards, and mice will still be available for some work, but the use of these devices will be the exception, not the rule. Conversations — between doctors and patients, between help desks and users, between interviewers and interviewees — will be carried on uninhibited by the need to document. 

The best new technologies will be those we don’t even notice we are using. And they aren’t too far away.