Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #11

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a world changing event,

a big volcanic eruption,

Wikipedia volunteers are supposed to

start printing out Wikipedia pages madly

and storing the paper in places

that their heirs could find it later.

MWhat this scanner measures,

it's an MRI scanner,

and it measures magnetic resonance energy

that's emanating from the brain.

So it's really extra sensory.

It's precise enough to tell us

what activity is occurring

in each little volume element

the size of a peppercorn.

When you read a sentence that says

"There are two elephants

walking across the savanna"

a computer program can

tell that the same thought

is going on in your brain

whether you're watching the video

or reading the sentence.

At a conceptual level it's the same.

It's also the same for

people across languages.

There's a universality of

the alphabet of human thoughts

and it applies to the videos that Jack

Gallant and his colleagues have found

but also applies to

spoken and written speech

and it crosses languages.

We have a vocabulary,

the brain has a vocabulary

and we're beginning to discover it.

Right now we need this

two million dollar machine

that weighs 16,000 pounds,

but you ask, in the future

will some genius biophysicist

invent a little cap or

helmet that'll do it?

I think that that's likely.

The energy, the electromagnetic energy,

is just sitting there. It's sitting there.

So when you talk about telepathy...

telepathy is communication

across a distance.

Well, we can already go a few millimeters

and it's just a matter of time

before we can go thousands of miles.

You could essentially,

in the not too distant

future, tweet thoughts.

So not type your little

tweet, but think it,

press a button

and all your followers

could potentially read it.

Could you detect,

this woman who is passing by

and spots you, is just about

to fall in love with you?

Now that would be an innovation.

That would be the...

the killer application

I guess you would say.

Well, I try not to make predictions

about anything less than two trillion

years from now for good reasons.

One is that no one will be able

to know if I'm wrong.

But that's one of the wonderful things

about the future is you don't

know where it's gonna go.

And the internet is, like most

results in science, out of control.

And if you think about predictions

about the future as done in the past,

they always miss the important stuff.

In fact, most science fiction

missed the most important thing

about the present world,

which is the internet itself.

They had flying cars,

they had rocket ships.

None of that exists,

but the internet governs our lives today.

It used to be that when

you communicated with someone

the person you were communicating with

was as important as the information.

Now on the internet,

the person isn't important at all.

In fact it was developed so that

scientists could communicate

scientists like me could

communicate with each other

without knowing where the other person

was or even who the other person was.

There's a famous cartoon from

The New Yorker which says

"On the internet no one

knows if you're a dog".

And in the future you won't know

if you're communicating with dogs

or robots or people, and it won't matter.

But becoming your own filter

will be the challenge of the future.

Because the filter isn't provided with you.

There's no controls on the internet.

No matter what governments do

or no matter what industries do,

the internet is gonna propagate...

out of control

and people will have to

be their own controls.

I think in the future, one next step

from computation to communication

will be to sensing and remote sensing.

And mind reading via the internet?

One of those sensors will

be brain imaging sensors.

And you will transmit thoughts?

The two of you.

Will our children's children's children

need the companionship of humans

or will they have evolved in a world

where that's not important?

It sounds awful, doesn't it?

But maybe it'll be fine.

Maybe the companionship of robots,

maybe the companionship of an

intelligent internet will be sufficient.

Who am I to say?

I'm standin' on a corner shovel in my hand

I'm lookin' for a woman or a workin' man

Honey, let me be your salty dog

Oh, let me be your salty dog

I won't be your man at all

Honey, let me be your salty dog

Let me be your salty dog

I won't be your man at all

Honey, let me be your salty dog

Well, let me be your salty dog

I won't be your man at all

Honey, let me be your salty dog

I want you do some pickin'

'cause I like that.

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