Knowledge, when shared, becomes like a grand, collective, inter-generational collaboration.
Language gives a group of humans a collective intelligence far greater than individual human intelligence and allows each human to benefit from the collective intelligence as if he came up with it all himself.
If language let humans send a thought from one brain to another, writing let them stick a thought onto a physical object, like a stone, where it could live forever.
The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism rose into existence.
Computers have been a game-changer, allowing humanity to outsource many of its brain-related tasks and better function as a single organism.
This ridiculous-looking thing is the most complex known object in the universe—three pounds of what neuroengineer Tim Hanson calls “one of the most information-dense, structured, and self-structuring matter known.”
When two people are together and talking, they’re using 50,000-year-old technology.
Despite all the magical powers humans have gained as a result of having learned to speak to each other, when it comes to actually speaking to each other, we’re no more magical than the people of 50,000 years ago.
The brain-interface future isn’t really a new thing that’s happening. If you take a step back, it looks more like the next big chapter in a trend that’s been going on for a long time. Language took forever to turn into writing, which then took forever to turn into printing, and that’s where things were when George Washington was around. Then came electricity and the pace picked up. Telephone. Radio. Television. Computers. And just like that, everyone’s homes became magical. Then phones became cordless. Then mobile. Computers went from being devices for work and games to windows into a digital world we all became a part of. Then phones and computers merged into an everything device that brought the magic out of our homes and put it into our hands. And on our wrists. We’re now in the early stages of a virtual and augmented reality revolution that will wrap the magic around our eyes and ears and bring our whole being into the digital world. You don’t need to be a futurist to see where this is going.
The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.
In that sense, your phone is as much “you” as your vocal cords or your ears or your eyes. All of these things are simply tools to move thoughts from brain to brain—so who cares if the tool is held in your hand, your throat, or your eye sockets?
The thing that makes a cyborg a cyborg is their capabilities—not from which side of the skull those capabilities are generated.
Putting our technology into our brains isn’t about whether it’s good or bad to become cyborgs. It’s that we are cyborgs and we will continue to be cyborgs—so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.
Your life is full of devices, including the one you’re currently using to read this. A wizard hat makes your brain into the device, allowing your thoughts to go straight from your head into the digital world.
There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is—your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So then, when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you.
None of it will take you by surprise. You won’t go from having nothing in your brain to a digital tertiary layer in your head, just like people didn’t go from the Apple IIGS to using Tinder overnight. The Wizard Era will come gradually, and by the time the shift actually begins to happen, we’ll all be very used to the technology, and it’ll seem normal.
The idea of collaboration today is supposed to be two or more brains working together to come up with things none of them could have on their own. And a lot of the time, it works pretty well—but when you consider the “lost in transmission” phenomenon that happens with language, you realize how much more effective group thinking would be.
How much faster could a team of engineers or architects or designers plan out a new bridge or a new building or a new dress if they could beam the vision in their head onto a screen and others could adjust it with their minds, versus sketching things out—which not only takes far longer, but probably is inevitably lossy?
People love to hate the concept of new technology—because they worry it’s unhealthy and makes us less human. But those same people, if given the option, usually wouldn’t consider going back to George Washington’s time, when half of children died before the age of 5, when traveling to other parts of the world was impossible for almost everyone, when a far greater number of humanitarian atrocities were being committed than there are today, when women and ethnic minorities had far fewer rights across the world than they do today, when far more people were illiterate and far more people were living under the poverty line than there are today. They wouldn’t go back 250 years—a time right before the biggest explosion of technology in human history happened. Sounds like people who are immensely grateful for technology. And yet their opinion holds—our technology is ruining our lives, people in the old days were much wiser, our world’s going to shit, etc. I don’t think they’ve thought about it hard enough.
Humanity is a superintelligent, tremendously-knowledgeable, millennia-old Colossus, with 7.5 billion neurons.
The invention of language allowed each human brain to dump its knowledge onto a pile before its death, and the pile became a tower and grew taller and taller until one day, it became the brain of a great Colossus that built us a civilization. The Human Colossus has been inventing things ever since, getting continually better at it with time. Driven only by the desire to create value, the Colossus is now moving at an unprecedented pace—which is why we live in an unprecedented and completely anomalous time in history.
We seem to be on a lot of historic timeline boundaries. After 1,000 centuries of human life and 3.8 billion years of Earthly life, it seems like this century will be the one where Earth life makes the leap from the Single-Planetary Era to the Multi-Planetary Era. This century may be the one when an Earthly species finally manages to wrest the genetic code from the forces of evolution and learns to reprogram itself. People alive today could witness the moment when biotechnology finally frees the human lifespan from the will of nature and hands it over to the will of each individual.
The Human Colossus is creating superintelligent AI for the same reason it created cars, factory machines, and computers—to serve as an extension of itself to which it can outsource work. Cars do our walking, factory machines do our manufacturing, and computers take care of information storage, organization, and computation.
Creating computers that can think will be our greatest invention yet—they’ll allow us to outsource our most important and high-impact work. Thinking is what built everything we have, so just imagine the power that will come from building ourselves a superintelligent thinking extension.
Could it be that a creation that’s better at thinking than any human on Earth might not be fully content to serve as a human extension, even if that’s what it was built to do?
Your devices give you cyborg superpowers and a window into the digital world. Your brain’s wizard hat electrode array is a new brain structure, joining your limbic system and cortex.
Among the wizard hat’s many uses, one of its core purposes will be to serve as the interface between your brain and a cloud-based customized AI system. That AI system will become as present a character in your mind as your monkey and your human characters—and it will feel like you every bit as much as the others do.
The communication bandwidth is extremely slow, particularly output. When you’re outputting on a phone, you’re moving two thumbs very slowly. That’s crazy slow communication. … If the bandwidth is too low, then your integration with AI would be very weak. Given the limits of very low bandwidth, it’s kind of pointless. The AI is just going to go by itself, because it’s too slow to talk to. The faster the communication, the more you’ll be integrated—the slower the communication, the less. And the more separate we are—the more the AI is “other”—the more likely it is to turn on us. If the AIs are all separate, and vastly more intelligent than us, how do you ensure that they don’t have optimization functions that are contrary to the best interests of humanity? … If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be “other”—it would be you and with a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system.
We’re going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet—you know, like a house cat or something—or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI.
The idea that human-AI integration will lend itself to the protection of the species makes intuitive sense. Our vulnerabilities in the AI era will come from bad people in control of AI or rogue AI not aligned with human values. In a world in which millions of people control a little piece of the world’s aggregate AI power—people who can think with AI, can defend themselves with AI, and who fundamentally understand AI because of their own integration with it—humans are less vulnerable. People will be a lot more powerful, which is scary, but like Elon said, if everyone is Superman, it’s harder for any one Superman to cause harm on a mass scale—there are lots of checks and balances. And we’re less likely to lose control of AI in general because the AI on the planet will be so widely distributed and varied in its goals.
Being blown away by the future speaks to the magic of our collective intelligence—but it also speaks to the naivety of our intuition. Our minds evolved in a time when progress moved at a snail’s pace, so that’s what our hardware is calibrated to. And if we don’t actively override our intuition—the part of us that reads about a future this outlandish and refuses to believe it’s possible—we’re living in denial.