How Neuralink Will Make Language Obsolete..
Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant could very well become the future of communications. And to understand how exactly that might take place, we need to do a bit of a thought experiment. For the next 10 minutes, let’s try and imagine a world where digital telepathy has overtaken spoken language as the primary method of communication among humans. Pretty trippy right? That’s what we’re talking about in the video today, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
What is Neuralink
We’ve already done a couple of videos with really lengthy explanations of what a Neuralink is and how it works, you can check out one of those after if you need more context. But the simple explanation is that a Neuralink is a Brain Computer Interface. The technology is most closely related to a Fitbit or smart watch, just a very small and simple computer. And that Fitbit is sewn into your brain by a robot surgeon that connects about a thousand tiny wires into the outer layer of grey matter. The biggest downside to a Neuralink installation is you will literally need another hole in your head. But no one will be able to tell. The device is designed to be the same thickness as your skull, so it will sit flush with the bone, then they just fold your skin flap back over and you are good to go. You’re now a cyborg.
What does it do
Once it’s in there, the Neuralink can read the neural impulses in your brain. Every action you take begins with a neuron firing in your head. Having a computer wired into your brain opens up a whole world of possibilities, like controlling any technology using just your thoughts alone, no need for a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen, just mind power. They’ve already shown a proof of concept of this idea by implanting two devices into the skull of a monkey and teaching him how to play the video game Pong with only his mind. But the aspect that we really want to drill down into today is how we can radically change the way that people communicate. How we might be able to replace speech and maybe even writing with a literal neural link between humans.
Elon’s Vision
Elon musk is obviously the mad scientist behind all of this. Elon didn’t invent the Brain Computer Interface, that’s been around for a surprisingly long time. Scientists have been sticking probes into brains for over 50 years now. But Elon has been the first to really imagine how BCI fits into the modern world that we’re building. And he’s had this idea of replacing language for a while now. The basic concept is pretty sound, Elon’s idea is that talking is just a very inefficient way of communicating information. Our brain spends a lot of effort compressing a complex concept into words and there's a lot of loss of information that occurs during that compression. So imagine if you could send that concept straight from your brain into an app, which would then broadcast it directly into the brain of another Neuralink user. As Elon says, you would be able to communicate very quickly and with far more precision using the device. You wouldn’t need to talk in order to get your ideas across. I could take whatever knowledge is encoded in my brain, and instantly transfer it into your brain. In Elon’s mind, this kind of digital communication would become so ubiquitous that we eventually reach a time where language is practiced only for sentimental reasons - like the way some people still practice blacksmithing, it’s not a necessary service anymore, we could all do just fine without it, but it’s fun to keep old traditions alive.
High Bandwidth Communications
It’s a little strange at first to think about language and speaking as an inefficient method of communication. Because it’s kind of all we’ve got right now. But it’s undeniable that a lot of human intention can get lost in translation. Take Elon himself for example, he might be one of the smartest people around, but he is far from the best orator or communicator. It’s plainly obvious when Elon speaks that he just can’t get everything that’s in his brain converted into words with efficiency. And that leads to a lot of misunderstandings, people think that he’a a fraud or a liar or a narcissist because they just don’t understand. Now imagine if Elon could just broadcast a concept like Full Self Driving straight from his brain to yours?
That’s where things start to get very out there, we’re not talking about telepathy in the sense of broadcasting your words into someone else's mind like has traditionally been portrayed in media. You know, like Obi Wan Kenobi speaking words into Luke’s mind. This is conceptual telepathy, a whole multidimensional idea uploaded from your mind and downloaded into the minds of others. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it certainly won’t be at first, but it just has to be an improvement on communicating visual and conceptual information.
Memory Based Languages
You know how it’s basically impossible to tell a story without editorializing or exaggerating some aspects of it? It can be fun to tell crazy stories but the true essence of the memory can get lost. And sometimes that’s important. Imagine if we could just share a memory directly? It would be as revolutionary as the invention of photography, instead of having to try and describe something that only you’ve seen, you can just show a picture and everyone else can see for themselves.
Think about a system for publicly accessible memories. It would only apply for people who have lived through significant events, no one needs to download a memory of your fishing trip. But imagine how much empathy we could build as a society if we could see the world, literally, through other people’s eyes. It’s so easy to just write off other people’s experiences and say, I don’t believe you. Or, that’s never happened to me. Communal memories would be an empathy bomb that might blow up the way we treat each other in society.
There’s a really cool but lesser known science fiction movie from the 90’s called Strange Days that deals pretty heavily in this idea of shared memories. If you’re into this kind of stuff it’s definitely worth a watch. They explore one of the darker aspects of this whole concept as well, which is how memories become a vice. People get addicted to living other people’s lives. It’s good to keep in mind that this isn’t all an Age of Aquarius kind of utopia, there is a downside to every up.
Emotional Language
Speaking of empathy, imagine Neuralink as a way to transmit emotions in their purest, most primal form. One of the crazy things about humans is that we all deal with our emotions in very unique ways. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves, but most people will try and mask their true feelings, either consciously or unconsciously. Like, we very often see someone present as angry or aggressive, when what they’re really feeling is frightened or insecure. Or too often people will appear really funny and happy, when they’re actually feeling really sad. As a society, we kind of suck at expressing our most primal emotions, we feel the necessity to put on these facades, like we’re playing characters instead of being our true selves. It’s not healthy and it leads to a whole lot of misunderstandings, which lead to a whole lot of conflicts. A function of Neuralink could be to just cut through the bullshit and share those base emotions freely with other people. It’s a radical change, but just think about how it might elevate society.
Connection Errors
That’s all the super optimistic take on the whole breakdown of language and rise of conceptual telepathy idea. In reality, things might not work out quite as smoothly. For one, we’re talking about transmitting the basic code that makes up the thoughts and memories in your brain. But we have no idea what that code looks like or how it’s written. We know it’s all some combination of neurons, which could in theory be translated to computer code. But things like computer coding are standardized, they were invented by people to work the same on every computer. You’re either on Windows or Mac or maybe Linux, and a piece of software will run the exact same on my Macbook as it will on yours because they’re standardized. If every computer had its own, unique operating system, then it would be nearly impossible to write software that would work properly for everyone. The odds that human brains are standardized in their design by nature is probably very slim. Imagine one one set of neurons firing in my brain, transfered into your brain, might not do the same thing, your brain might read that series of code completely differently. That would throw a big wrench into the whole thing. It’s probably still something that can be solved, there are not many things that are truly impossible, but it really adds a thick layer of complication.
Another form of incompatibility might come from differences in experience. As people, all of our perceptions are influenced by our experiences. And we’re not sure that might affect the transfer of a concept between two people. If our understanding of an idea is framed by our experience, then we could run into an incompatibility with others who don’t share those same experiences. Maybe that context then needs to be a part of the transfer as well? Going back to Elon Musk, maybe in order to receive and understand a concept straight from Elon’s brain, you would also have to understand everything makes Elon Musk, Elon Musk. His lived experience might be just as crucial a part of understanding that idea as the technical data.
That’s where things start to get a bit too crazy. There are much smarter people than me out there who can hopefully figure that all out. I’m going to try and preserve my sanity and not think about it too much.
Timeline
So how far off into the future is all this stuff? It sounds like some 22nd century kind of evolution. But if you think like Elon Musk, then it’s actually just around the corner. Elon is saying that we are five to ten years away from Neuralink being able to substitute for language. Which is frightening, to be honest. Now, of course we have to be mindful of Elon time with this one. Whenever Elon says something will be ready, we need to at least do a basic conversion of doubling that timeline to get closer to real life. So 10, maybe 20 years. That’s still nuts, but it’s more manageable for my feeble brain. Why does Elon do things like this? Like promise that he can make language obsolete in 5 years? It might have a lot to do with his style of leadership, like maybe he sees it as a motivation - if he genuinely believes this insanely complex project can be done in 5 years, then his engineers will start to believe it can be done as well. It might still end up taking 20 years to do, but your attitude determines your altitude.
In the meantime, we’re still waiting on the first human trials of the Neuralink device. Elon has said that he’s hopeful that it could happen this year, again Elon time, but there is a lot of good news so far. We’ve seen the monkey with not one, but two implants in his skull, and the monkey seemed just fine. So it’s reasonable to believe that a human with a Neuralink would come through the procedure just as fine. What we do know is that the first people to be getting these implants won’t be doing it for fun, the first clinical trials will be done for medical reasons. Neuralink are hoping that the first version of their implant will be able to help people who suffer from paralysis to interface with devices like computers and smartphones. It’s a small first step that would greatly improve the quality of life for the people who need it.
The mass market roll out of Neuralink comes later, but because of the automated process for installing these devices, once the average Joe is able to get one of these, the adoption rate can ramp up incredibly fast.
