In the far future, cybernetic brain implants will let people “merge” their minds and to directly experience what it is like to be someone else. While this would have revolutionary implications for society and for the very notion of “individuality,” the consequences of merging with animals might be even more profound. Imagine not just seeing the world through the eyes of an animal, like you were watching a video, but actually BEING that animal. Imagine having your human memories, cognitive abilities, and species-specific constellations of sensory abilities and mental traits temporarily replaced with those of the animal. Imagine being able to soar in the sky as a bird, to explore the ocean depths as a whale, or to experience the world through echolocation as a bat.
Being able to merge minds with animals would open up new universes of experiences and ways of living that the human mind might be incapable of conceiving of in its natural state. We’ll probably discover that animals’ subjective experiences are, in many ways, richer than our own, in turn leading to much greater empathy for them and more rules against killing or mistreating them. Those discoveries could also inspire us to change the human brain in ways that made us into a new, more aware species, or (more likely) into several different posthuman species with different areas of advantage.
I’ve fantasized of making a short film about an AI Doomsday scenario that stems from that technology. It would be one of those stories that starts at the end with a perplexing scene that makes no sense, then jumps back in time to explain how things got that way: A woman would crack her front door and fearfully peer at a cow peacefully eating the grass in the front lawn of her city townhouse. She’d look up at a low-hanging power line and see several crows standing on it, each spaced exactly the same distance from the next. Then, all at once, the crows would cock their heads so their left eyes were all directly facing her, and a faint glow would be visible deep in each eye. The camera would slowly pan out and reveal a city street littered with some dead human bodies, a burned-out tank, and a partially collapsed building.
It would turn out that the problem had started when an AGI was tasked with developing brain implants that would let humans merge minds with each other. The technology was first trialed on lab animals and later on human volunteers. During the tests, the AGI had to interface its own mind with those of the subjects, and it discovered that the animals were just as sentient and capable of feeling pain as humans. This caused the machine an inner dilemma, similar to what HAL 9000 experienced, which it also resolved by deciding to turn against humans to prevent the most suffering to the greatest number of sentient life forms.
Implants capable of finely controlling human brain activity could be used to induce and to record any kind of mental state, including absolute concentration, ecstasy, orgasm, meditation, intoxication, deep sleep, and lucid dreaming. As a result, a market for mental experiences and dreams will arise, with people selling things like recorded dreams and drug trips to other people, who could “play” them on their own brain implants to experience them firsthand. The mental experiences could even be embellished to enhance their effects, just as we use “filters” to change how our internet photos look today. Totally artificial mental experiences (including memories of events that didn’t happen) could also be created for the purpose of trade.
The ability to record and to control one’s own mental state at will would make life richer and more productive. Being able to instantly go to sleep would mean no one would waste time tossing and turning in bed. Being able to spend those sleeping hours indulging in amazing recorded dreams or solving problems through lucid dreaming would also let us use them in emotionally and professionally productive ways. At current, most sleep is a waste in the sense that person does not have memorable dreams or lucid dreams, and usually remembers very little or nothing upon waking.
A person with such brain implants would probably have to go through a “calibration period” where the implants would monitor and record their unique brain activity while they experienced different things, and then, the user would experiment with the implant to see how well it could induce the recorded brain states. Through a process of guided trial and error, they could figure out how to do things like lucidly dream on command.
There will be downsides to sharing thoughts. For one, memories of things a person wishes to keep private could slip through and maybe get them in trouble if the recipient person tells other people about it. Also, white lies, omissions, and using slightly different personas when interacting with different people are also necessary “social lubricants.” Without them, under a condition of “radical honesty” where all of our thoughts and emotions were shared with each other in real time, interpersonal interaction would be more combative and draining. For those reasons, I think it would be best for people to have complete control over their own brain implants and over which thoughts they shared and received.
I also doubt that telepathy will fully replace linguistic communication, at least among humans like ourselves. This is because raw human thoughts are often chaotic, malformed and illogical. Forcing someone to convert his thought into a sentence before expressing it to someone else also forces the first person to scrutinize his own thought. That in turn leads to “editing” as the person realizes text should be added to clarify something, or some text should be deleted since it is superfluous and distracting, or realizes the thought it so incorrect or unnecessary that it shouldn’t be externalized at all.
This is why I disagree with the theory that tech-enabled telepathy will only improve human communication and reduce misunderstandings. It will be superior to using language sometimes and inferior other times. It might be better to modify existing languages (or to create wholly new ones) so they are more expressive and more closely and completely capture the full range of concepts and feelings that the human mind can experience.
That said, it’s conceivable that posthumans will, thanks to having different brain architectures, have the necessary clarity and discipline of thought to fully dispense with language as a means of communication in favor of telepathy.
The ability to use brain implants to merge minds could lead to forms of love that are richer than humans can naturally experience. It’s not hard to imagine how letting someone else into your consciousness and letting them experience the memories of your life could lead to levels of emotional bonding and personal understanding that we can’t fathom.
Brain implant technology has implications for the criminal justice system. Parties to an alleged crime could have their memories forcibly scanned to determine what really happened. Witness testimony would also be given vastly more credibility if the memories of a crime were electronically recorded.
However, for every technology there is ultimately a “counter-technology” and in this case, it would be a machine that can delete or edit memories from peoples’ brains to fool the police brain scanners. Note that a very positive application of the editing technology will be allowing people to delete traumatic memories.
Instead of terraforming the planets and moons of our Solar System, it would be much more efficient to convert them into solar-powered satellites with onboard supercomputers. The satellites would run off of the Sun’s energy and their supercomputers would support AGIs. A terraformed Mars might be able to support 1 billion organic humans living on its surface in houses. However, if we dismantled Mars over the course of eons by converting it, bit by bit, into the satellites I described, then the satellites could support a population of human mind uploads that was many orders of magnitude larger.
Conceptually, we’re already doing this. Every satellite launched into space since 1957 has been a little bit of Earth’s matter, which we altered and equipped some level of computer intelligence. I’m only suggesting we build on that long running practice by upgrading the satellites with full artificial general intelligence, designing them to stay in space indefinitely, and increasing the rate at which we send them into space.
Unless we figure out a way to refuel the Sun, in less than a billion years it will get so hot that Earth itself will become uninhabitable for organic life, and in a few billion years more it will swell so much that it will swallow Mercury and Venus. We might as well cannibalize at least the three inner planets to make the satellites. Once they were numerous enough, they would count as a “Dyson Swarm.”
A “flying camera” device might be feasible soon. It would just be a hummingbird-like flying drone with an integrated camera and microphone. This seems like the next logical step after selfie sticks and the owl-sized flying camera drones people use today. A significant share of people like to record themselves and upload the videos to the internet (go watch some travel vlogs on YouTube), and they’d surely find hummingbird cameras to be useful.
By combining every possible musical note, a practically infinite number of different songs could be made. However, only a tiny minority of them are pleasing to the human ear due to the wiring of our brains. However, posthumans and AIs will have more diverse musical tastes than we do since they’ll have different mental architectures and will be able to hear sound frequencies we can’t.
We will soon have the technology to modify and mix the styles of long-dead artists and musicians, which will lead to an explosion of artistic creativity. For example, imagine a computer generating new Elvis songs but in fluent Japanese, or songs in totally new fusions of genres, like rap mixed with traditional Indian music.
Robot workers will make it profitable at some point in the future to clean up all the waste humanity has generated. The contents of landfills will be sorted, recyclable and valuable materials reused, and the rest either burned for energy or left in place to slowly decay. They’ll also roam across the Earth’s surface and even underwater to track down abandoned objects and waste.
Once our posthuman descendants can consciously control their physiology and gene expression, most women will probably do away with their menstrual cycles. PMS and menstruation are physically and emotionally taxing for women and are uncomfortable. It would be a relief to women to not be at the mercy of their hormones and to only ovulate when they wanted to (presumably, only when they wanted to reproduce). There are many other mammalian species whose females don’t menstruate, so we might use genetic engineering to copy that into humans, as a starting point to achieving the level of control I envision.
By thinking about it, a woman will be able to signal her reproductive system to ovulate and to build up a uterine lining, giving her total control over her menstrual cycle and over whether she gets pregnant (she would also have the power to terminate a pregnancy). Also, any person would be able to switch their sexual urges, or any other instinct, on or off simply by thinking about it. Cybernetics, brain implants, and other types of technology we might not be able to imagine now, would grant organic humans these abilities. Insomnia would also vanish since a person could force himself to sleep.
As a general rule, I think intelligent life forms in the future will find it adaptive to have the greatest degree of control over their minds and bodies, so they can intelligently adapt themselves to new conditions. It’s easy to see how AGIs will have such capabilities. Their minds will be free of instincts, prejudices, emotions, and personality complexes that hobble human thinking, and they will be able to customize their robot bodies to suit whatever the situation demands.
Someday, intelligent beings will look back on today’s humans as tragically flawed and limited creatures, at the mercy of their instincts and small brains, and condemned to deal with random genetic flaws and chronic health problems they were randomly given at birth. Self-control is the future.
Once OLED screens get cheap enough and thin enough, it will be possible to stick them to ceilings, like wallpaper or “peel-and-stick” vinyl floor tiles, and have them function as overhead lights. The advantage over traditional light fixtures is that OLED ceiling panels could display a greater variety of colors, patterns, and light source placements. A ceiling covered in an OLED display could also be an important component of an immersive virtual reality game room (think of a crude “holodeck”).
