The Problem
Human languages are lossy compression. Lost in translation is not just a phrase but a reality. If you explain in words an image to your friend, you can provide only so much detail, and the actual details in the image can never be matched.
Similar is the purport of any form of verbal communication that humans employ. When two engineers or lawyers talk to each other, they are often able to complete each other’s sentences because they have been trained on the same stuff or model. But otherwise, it is seldom the case.
Proposed Solution
Neuralink proposes a novel long-term solution here. Just connect your brain directly with the network and remove the latency. It sounds easier said than done, but Neuralink has already made significant progress in this field. Many people who have been offered the Neuralink device have been able to operate computers and play video games just by using their mind. Of course, it is not perfect zero latency currently, and there is input lag, bandwidth constraints and so on, but the progress is tremendous and mind-boggling.
It will be truly an evolutionary leap as and when Neuralink becomes a widely available technology. The level of discourse will get uplifted by an order of magnitude. Imagine instantaneous communication of thoughts. There will be no need of speaking. How strange would such a society be? Very much so. In such a society, people would speak only for fun, not out of necessity, because all the important things would be communicated through brain-to-brain communication without requiring speech. Verbal communication will be optional and, in the future, if such technologies continue to scale, the art of speaking may become extremely obscure and reach the verge of extinction. Why would you watch a show on YouTube when you can ingest all its contents in the form of bandwidth in a fraction of a second?
Post-Neuralink Society
A Cyberpunk 2077 or The Matrix-like reality where you can just upload data into the brain will be surreal and beyond our comprehension. Unless humans kill each other in a world war or something, that possibility of zero latency is on the horizon. And we should not be afraid of embracing it. If something is possible in physics, then it is very much within the rules of the universe and it must be explored. If we do not explore that possibility, we will be just ignoring the hard physical realities. I cannot even think of a good movie that would visualize a post-Neuralink society because such a movie would have to be a silent movie for most parts. Imagine you want to have a meeting in the future. You just have to make a brain-to-brain connection, transmit thoughts, receive some, and it is done. The meeting is over in less than 2 seconds!
However, one thing that may still exist in a post-Neuralink society would be music. Music is timeless, and maybe listening to music in the form of data only would not be that enjoyable. Music might be created majorly by AI in the future, but its listeners and aficionados might still crave the physical sensation of sound waves in harmony that music in the form of pure data may not be able to provide.
There are so many aspects that are required to be taken into account when we think of a post-Neuralink society. The whole meaning of life will change for everyone. What it means to be a human, how we teach, how we raise our offspring, everything will be so different.
Don’t Panic!
Many people also have fears surrounding this technology, that it might involve hacking our minds or selling our souls and deepest thoughts to a company. I think those fears are justified at some level, but if the technology is implemented in a responsible manner, much of these concerns can be alleviated. Cyber-security, like any other form of security, requires constant vigilance and updating. There will be some genuine risks that will always be present, but those risks can always be mitigated. There can never be a situation where the risks become absolute zero. Such is not the nature of physics. The universe deals in probabilities and chances. We can reduce them to make our environment reasonably safe, but nothing is absolute.
The Road Ahead
Also, the thought that such a future is very distant and that we should not think about all these things today deserves to be repelled. We already have Neuralink that has made significant progress. And with the advent of AI, progress in every field of research has exponentiated. Thus, if a technology was 1000 years away 10 years ago, today with the foray of AI, that same technology’s gestation period has reduced at least by an order of magnitude. So, the same thing might be just 100 years away now. And given the trends, with further advances in computing, artificial intelligence and allied technologies, a shift of another order of magnitude is quite likely in the near future. So, it might become just 10 years away before long.
A good example is that of nuclear fusion. 100 years ago, it was 30 years away and today as well, it seems 30 years away, and people joke about it that such exotic stuff will always remain 30 years away because of the sheer nature of the problem and its complexity. All that is good, but we cannot discount the actual progress that has been made in the field of nuclear fusion in the last few decades. Those advances are real. Today we have multiple nuclear fusion reactors operating across several continents. Countries like China alone have many of them. The constraints to creating a tokamak reactor have reduced considerably. We should be grateful to the scientists that they make most of their research open-source. And with AI in the picture, nuclear fusion reactors that actually generate more energy than they take are on the horizon today.
All these reasons and others keep the hope alive that Neuralink will become a mature technology in the near future. Elon Musk has himself said that more human trials relating to Neuralink are to take place by the end of this year. It is an exciting future ahead.