Neuralink presents the possibility of lossless transmission of our thoughts and learnings at maximum speed. Here’s what I mean:
Imagine you didn’t have to read the rest of this post. Imagine that you could understand my perspective on Neuralink in 1 second instead of 12 minutes, and 10x better. Imagine that you could download the most distilled version of my thoughts on this topic — to essentially download my perspective into your brain and examine it objectively while interpreting it — all in less time than it takes for you to read this paragraph. Now imagine doing that with all ideas for the rest of your life.
This post focuses on the constraints we already have in the way we create, communicate and think. This post then tries to imagine what may happen when such constraints are removed.
Our thoughts are constrained by our vocabulary
Something revolutionary happened when we, as a species, learned to verbalize our thoughts. We built a system of language, a vocabulary, a grammar — all to be able to communicate the ideas in our minds in the most effective way.
While this was revolutionary, we must consider how limiting this is. We are limited in our expression by our vocabulary. It is often difficult to find the right words, in the right sequence, to pack the perfect punch. It’s not easy to either explain or to be understood.
Case in point: our most important jobs are centered around communication.
And what would you do when words can’t explain what you mean? When ideas themselves are new? All scientific breakthroughs have come with an expansion to our vocabulary — we had to invent ways to explain novel things to one another.
The vocabulary for all ideas that are brand-new is missing by definition. And this missing vocabulary becomes a constraint for the spread of new ideas, both on the side of the speaker who must come up with it, and on the side of the receiver, who must accommodate it. There is way too much friction here.
Neuralink can help eliminate this friction entirely. It can create a world where we will always be perfectly understood, no matter what we say. In this world, new ideas will be generated and transmitted at the speed of light.
Our vocabulary is colored by our experience
We spoke of the difficulty of expanding our vocabulary. But consider this. Our dictionaries don’t necessarily match, either. “You know what I mean, right?”, we ask, because we can never tell.
Kim Krizan puts this very nicely, in this clip from the incredible film, Waking Life.
Would all readers of this post understand the same thing when they read the word “love”? Does the word mean the same to all of them? Would they have the same reaction to it?
Words, while being limiting as explained before, also suffer from this problem of dictionaries. We have to memorize these words, and we need to have matching dictionaries, for communication to be perfect.
What would happen if the dictionaries became irrelevant? What if we could be perfectly understood by each other by communicating in an even purer form? It is possible that we may create a system of communication that is extremely precise, and totally unconstrained by the words that are available to us.
And what can we do with all the space the dictionary is taking up in our brains?
There will be a Cambrian Explosion of Art
Thinking in language, or writing things down, or speaking them, is a way to initiate a feedback loop in our own minds. This feedback loop helps us examine and refine our thoughts and bring them to a finished, well-formed state. Think of a musician, riffing and jamming to fine-tune that song as it makes its way out of their mind.
This loop, too, can be sped up many orders of magnitude with a brain-machine interface.
But beyond verbal applications, things really heat up.
Imagine the barriers to becoming a musician. Or an artist. As a person with stupid fingers, my hands simply refuse to coordinate with my mind in a productive way. So, I can neither play an instrument or paint or draw without serious investments in effort.
This means that there are quite a few barriers for me to paint something beautiful, or to strum a guitar and create a great tune, even though it is possible I could imagine the music in my mind, or see the image in my mind.
This is incredibly limiting. But what if my hands and my mind didn’t need to coordinate?
What if we could play music with our minds? Or to create art with our imagination? Or design with our thoughts? This would lead to the cambrian explosion in creativity, creating forms that we can’t even imagine right now. How would this change our culture?
The quality of our thoughts is the quality of our civilization
So, as explained in this article, Neuralink can help us to
- Communicate ideas new and old at light speed
- With perfect precision
- And perfect refinement
- By removing all barriers to communication, thought and creativity
- Leading to new ideas to be expressed in ways we can’t even imagine
This will alter our civilization in ways space flight and electric cars just can’t.
The more I think about Neuralink, the more it seems like the biggest idea Elon is working on. Because we can’t be going into space as apes that learned to create and match their vocabulary. We need to go to space as telepathic beings with unlimited creative and intellectual capabilities.
Neuralink will make this possible.
