yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Can We Have Brain-to-Brain Communication? | Michio Kaku |Big Think


3m read
·Nov 4, 2024

There’s no doubt that the internet is creating what is called an intelligent planet; that is, the skin of the planet Earth is becoming a network by which intelligent creatures communicate with each other. But that's just the first step. Some people think that the next step in the coming decades is not going to be the internet. It's going to be Brain Net because we're at the point now where we can actually connect computers to the living mind.

In fact, I was just at Berkeley a few weeks ago, where I had a demonstration of this: we can actually create videos of your thoughts. These videos are not perfectly accurate, but I saw a demonstration in a laboratory at Berkeley where you can actually see in a video screen what people are thinking. So with electrodes, perhaps, or EEG sensors in a helmet connected to our brain, perhaps one day we'll be able to have brain-to-brain communication, and that gives us the possibility of Brain Net.

In fact, some of the leading neurologists doing these experiments have seriously proposed a brain net whereby you would exchange not just information like typing, but also emotions and feelings, because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts. And then what comes beyond that? Well, of course, beyond that is science fiction, and science fiction gives us all sorts of horror stories of things like Sky Net: maybe one day the internet will become sentient; maybe one day the internet will think that humans are in the way and perhaps the internet will take over just like in the Terminator series.

Well, I don't think so. The internet is simply a way in which minds can communicate with other minds. We see no self-awareness in the internet. Now some people say, “Well, what about some kind of collective consciousness that arises by an emergent phenomenon?” Well, that's a lot of gobbledygook. That's a lot of nice words. Maybe. Maybe not. But it's pure speculation at the present time.

Even in the laboratory with our finest instruments and the latest developments in artificial intelligence, we cannot make a computer become self-aware. You realize that one of our most advanced computers was the IBM computer Watson, which defeated two humans on the program Jeopardy. At that point, many pundits said, “Oh my God, the end is near; the robots are going to put us in zoos; they're going to throw peanuts at us; make us dance behind bars when they take over, just like we make bears dance behind bars today.”

Well, just remember that Watson, no matter how fast it is, was so stupid you couldn't congratulate it. You can't go up to Watson, slap its transistors, and say, “Good boy! You just beat two humans on Jeopardy. You made history. Let's drink to it!” You see, Watson is an adding machine—a very sophisticated adding machine. It adds billions of times faster than the human brain, but that's all it is. It's what is called an expert system.

It deals with formalized inputs, formalized outputs. You talk to an expert system every time you're on the telephone, and the telephone says, “Please hit button one; please hit number two for the next option.” That's called an expert system. It's basically a sophisticated adding machine that sounds like it's thinking, but it's not. It's simply using formalized logic. If you hit one, then you go there. If you hit two, you go someplace else. That's Watson—of course, on a very, very sophisticated level.

So I personally think that we don't have to worry that the internet is going to become sentient.

More Articles

View All
Weaving Tradition: How Tweed Keeps a Community’s Heritage Alive | Short Film Showcase
[Music] I’m Rebecca Hutton, and I’m a single Harris Tweed Weaver. My granny used to weave back in the day, and my great granny. Everybody used to weave; there was a weaving tradition at practically every household when I was growing up. The Harris Tweed …
Guy Spier: How to Invest in 2024 (During Inflation and High Interest Rates)
In 2024, we’re going to be dealing with some of the toughest economic conditions we’ve seen in a very long time, and that begs the question: how do we approach our own investing for the year ahead? Well, recently, I got to sit down with legendary investor…
Harry Zhang with Kevin Hale on Building Lob to Automate the Offline World
Today we have Harry Zhang, co-founder of Lob. Lob makes APIs for companies to send letters and postcards. So, Kevin has a question for you. “I’m trying to think back to when you guys applied to YC. You didn’t have almost anything. Like, I would say it wa…
How to light multiple matches with a single bullet
Hey, it’s me Destin. About three years ago I did a YouTube video, but I tried to have a lot of matches with a bullet, and I never could do it. So, we’ve kind of up the ante here. We’ve taken that same rifle, that Ruger 10⁄22, and we’ve made a fully adjust…
Verifying solutions to differential equations | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
[Instructor] So let’s write down a differential equation: the derivative of y with respect to x is equal to four y over x. And what we’ll see in this video is the solution to a differential equation isn’t a value or a set of values. It’s a function or a…
Growth vs Value Investing. Which is Better?
Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! In this video, we are going to be comparing two corners of the investing world: that is, growth investing versus value investing. We’re going to have a look at what each one is about, compare the two, and also look a…