Unmade #3
Towards Telepathy
Have you ever wondered how we will communicate in the year 2050?
We’ll take a little break from the Blockchains this week. We’ve learnt a lot about them in the past two weeks. This week, we are going to talk about us — Home Sapiens.
I’ve recently finished reading the two infamous books by Yuval Noah Harari — Sapiens and Home Deus, and I cannot stop thinking about the future of communication among our species.
Let’s talk about communication this week.
Why is communication important?
Language is not unique to our species. Every species of animals can communicate among themselves. Upon seeing a lion behind the shrubs, monkeys can make noises to alert their group, and within a blink of an eye, all of them could be seen on top the trees. What separates our language from the rest is that we can not only communicate at that moment but also tell stories after that. We have developed our language such that it can be used to tell the stories of the lion long after the moment has passed.
Unlike monkeys, humans could go back to their caves and tell their families how they escaped a lion during the hunt. Soon enough, we realized we don’t really need to escape lions to tell stories about them. Fiction took birth. We then realized we don’t even have to keep our storytelling confined to the real animals. Mythology took birth.
Our most important technology
“Stories are our most important technology.” — Jon Westenberg
Before stories, we lived in fragmented groups, but they allowed the groups to grow beyond thousands in number. Communication was always at the core of progress.
We have made exponential progress in the last decade, and also, we have made communication more inclusive, fast and reliable in the last ten years. The speed of communication directly affects the rate of progress.
In the early days, there was no method of communication, and one invention was often made in different parts of the world at the same time by different people. Soon, news of inventions started spreading, and we have begun building ideas on top of others’ ideas.
Communication is the key.
Communication 2.0
I sometimes wonder, how communication will evolve in the decades and centuries to come. Looking around, I am entirely sure of the emergence of new mediums to tell stories. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) made it possible that when I tell you a story, you don’t have to spend a lot of energy imagining my words in pictures. Most probably, I will be able to bring out my imagination and immerse you inside it for you to experience it exactly like I am going through.
Immersive communication is coming, and it is nearer than you are ready to believe it to be. But I still wonder, why do we need a medium that is outside of our bodies to tell the stories. Earlier it was cave paintings, then came paper, then audio, and pictures, and moving pictures (videos), and moving pictures in three dimensions (virtual reality).
What if whatever I am thinking can reach directly inside your brain? When forwarding a thought from my brain to an external medium to your eyes to your brain, sometimes, a few fundamental elements of the story are lost in the translation.
What if your brain could speak directly to mine?
How will it feel like?
Right now, you are gaining some knowledge from this blog post (I hope, you are), and you know that you gained this knowledge by reading something on the internet. If I could just talk to your brain without having to put up this newsletter/website, you’d still have the knowledge, but you wouldn’t know how did you gain it. Will you know at least that it came from me? Most certainly. But through what medium? I’ve heard they call it ‘telepathy.’
Telepathy might sound straight out of the science fiction, and it is. Didn’t I tell you stories play a huge role in our progress? It turns out it does so in more ways than one.
Current state of telepathy
The heat is picking up when it comes to Brain Machine Interfaces. A few months back, Elon Musk (the man closest to Tony Stark that we can get) started a new company called Neuralink. The idea is to build a Brain Machine Interface that can enhance our capabilities in every way imaginable.
Want to learn a new language? BOOM. And done. Want to learn to drive? BOOM. And done. Having a hard time telling that girl how you feel about her? BOOM. And done. (Or does it still has to take its own course and time? Debatable.)
Besides Neuralink, Facebook is supposedly working on something similar.
“One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” Zuckerberg said during a June 2015 Q&A. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like.”
Earlier this year, they were also hiring PhDs with a background and experience in Neuroscience. The whole industry is in early stages, but hobbyists have been tinkering with brain interfaces for years now, but all of those were mere toys.
Here’s a video of a hobbyist controlling the color of a LED using his brain.
It’s time to move beyond controlling the color of a light to something more granular and useful.
How one can pursue building such an expensive product?
If you have successfully built a company before, all you need is a compelling story to raise some money and deploy a world-class research team on to the problem. (Didn’t I tell you stories help us progress in more than one way?)
It’s highly likely that you don’t belong in the above category. Many disrupters in the past didn’t belong either and were first-timers too.
Do we know someone who is known for taking really long shots and that too, successfully? Our own Tony Stark. Tim Urban has nailed down a pattern on which Elon Musk executes his long-shot ideas.
The important part of his formula is the maroon box at the bottom — “Sustainable Business Model.”
Sustainable Business Model for building Telepathy
While on a quest to revolutionize the way communication happens, there must be a business model that keeps feeding the efforts. It could be boring and dull, but it must make money for your business.
For a company that would make telepathy possible, this sustainable business model could be of making an expensive but portable and high-resolution EEG instrument. Consider this device analogous to Linux, on top of which every application gets built.
Hobbyists will buy and build amazing things on top of it. Portable EEG devices are still available in the market, but their resolution is not high and thus limiting the kind of applications that developers can develop on top of them.
A high resolution, portable and non-invasive EEG device can be a good starting point towards the goal of giving this world a new way to tell stories.
Communication is turning towards telepathy.
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About the author
Mohit Mamoria is the curator of a weekly newsletter, Unmade, which delivers one idea from the future (just like this one) to your inboxes.
Originally published at https://unmade.email/editions/towards-telepathy.
