- I'm Tim Urban, and some people would
consider me heretical
because I am down to get out of my biological body.
I will put machines in my brain,
I will upload my consciousness, whatever.
It doesn't sound that great
being a dying mammal to me.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like.
But, what if they're right?
- A generation or two down the road,
many or most humans on Earth might have a
an interface in- under their skull, in their brain
that allows them to connect
their brain to the outside world.
And that's a concept
that a lot of people are extremely uncomfortable with,
for the same reason probably that people were
uncomfortable with organ transplants
when they first became a new technology.
The concept of ‘Transhumanism,’
of enhancing a human, in a way that,
that couldn't have been done to a caveman—
I think that's actually not a black and white thing.
I think it happens gradually.
Every generation we become a little more transhuman.
And if you look back, every generation
there's a huge amount of resistance to it.
If you say to people, you know, “Do you think it's good
if humans become cyborgs?”
Many people will say, “No.”
But what's a cyborg?
It's a person that has, also, tech capabilities.
If I want to talk to you, I can talk to you in person.
We can talk from ten feet away.
Or, I can talk to you
when you’re on the other side of the planet,
and we can talk with FaceTime.
That is a cyborg capability.
The thing that we might say would actually make us
an official cyborg is if
the phone were on the other side of our skin
or actually in our head.
But is that a meaningful thing?
To me, what side of the skull the tech is on
is not a big deal.
The fact is, these are both cyborgs.
Person holding the phone against their head
is kind of a low-grade cyborg.
The one with the phone capability inside their head
is just a more advanced cyborg.
We're already cyborgs, so let's, let's go for it.
Let's just become the best cyborgs we can.
When people hear about
brain-machine interfaces, they think it's icky.
But, we have pacemakers.
That's a machine.
We have Deep Brain Stimulation currently
for Parkinson's patients.
People who are hearing impaired
use cochlear implants.
That's a brain-machine interface.
So, we're already in a world of brain-machine interfaces,
and they're just very primitive.
Right now,
thoughts from my head are going
into your head as the viewer of this.
And that's pretty cool.
But what we're not really thinking about is,
how much information is lost in that transfer.
When we're speaking sentences,
we're always giving very crude,
compressed approximations
of much higher res, larger files,
you know, nuanced thoughts.
And with brain-machine interfaces, forget words.
Well, why would we need to compress anymore?
Just send the nuanced thought.
Elon Musk calls it ‘Conceptual Telepathy.’
You're not saying words in my head—
you can do that, but why?
Just think to me.
I think with practice we could all get good at this
and then you think about the possibilities;
it doesn't just have to be me
communicating a concept to you.
We can have five of us together
having a joint brainstorm.
We've actually formed, kind of, a ‘super brain’
and we're just thinking together
and we might come up with an incredible epiphany
that none of us could have come up with alone.
There's a lot of scary, emergent properties
of humans.
You know, look at Twitter today.
Just like we have the ability to form,
you know, larger groups for creativity, for collaboration,
groups that, that the core emotion is love,
which is great.
We have ability to form
groups where the core emotion is hate, where
a group is bound by a common enemy,
by the dehumanization of a common enemy,
by common bigotry.
This is very common.
You could say the internet
was a, did a godsend for individuality,
for, for good ideas to spread.
It also did wonders for mob rule.
And I think brain-machine interfaces—
we will probably have some amazing things
to come out of it.
And also, there'll be a lot of people
getting indoctrinated into some bad ideas
in a very, much more intense way.
I would still say
most of us probably wouldn't give up the internet
and go back to that planet— go live on,
go live in 1990 for two weeks
and tell me you want to stay there
and you don't want to come back
to the world that we live in now.
You probably would like to be here.
I think we need to reconsider
this assumption that, that natural is good
and artificial is bad.
Because your clothes are not natural,
your home is not natural.
The heating in your home is not natural,
your car is not natural.
So, I think the boundary we think there is
between natural and artificial
is actually kind of a total construct.
It's not real.
And that we should embrace the kind of species we are,
which is something that builds a lot of tools
of all different kinds.
Beavers build dams,
and humans do 100,000 examples of that.
And we're just ‘super beavers’ that use
a million different kinds of things, not just,
you know, not just dams.
Beavers have one hack. We have a million.
Yeah, we're super beavers.
- Yeah, that's the name of my softball team.