Michio Kaku: Brain-Computer Interfaces | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | - How promising in the near term, in your view,
00:00:04.880 | is brain-machine interfaces?
00:00:06.720 | So starting to allow computers to talk directly
00:00:10.860 | to the brains, Elon Musk is working on that with Neuralink,
00:00:14.800 | and there's other companies working on this idea.
00:00:16.960 | Do you see promise there?
00:00:18.440 | Do you see hope for near-term impact?
00:00:20.880 | - Well, every technology has pluses and minuses.
00:00:24.340 | Already, we can record memories.
00:00:26.560 | I have a book, "The Future of the Mind,"
00:00:28.880 | where I detail some of these breakthroughs.
00:00:30.800 | We can now record simple memories of mice
00:00:34.320 | and send these memories on the internet.
00:00:37.320 | Eventually, we're gonna do this with primates
00:00:40.060 | at Wake Forest University and also in Los Angeles.
00:00:43.100 | And then after that, we'll have a memory chip
00:00:46.960 | for Alzheimer's patients.
00:00:48.860 | We'll test it out in Alzheimer's patients
00:00:50.840 | because, of course, when Alzheimer's patients
00:00:53.800 | lose their memory, they wander.
00:00:55.760 | They create all sorts of havoc, wandering around,
00:00:59.640 | oblivious to their surroundings, and they'll have a chip.
00:01:03.640 | They'll push the button, and memories,
00:01:06.220 | memories will come flooding into their hippocampus
00:01:09.080 | and the chip, telling them where they live and who they are.
00:01:14.080 | And so a memory chip is definitely in the cards,
00:01:17.520 | and I think this will eventually affect human civilization.
00:01:21.180 | What is the future of the internet?
00:01:23.080 | The future of the internet is brain net.
00:01:25.680 | Brain net is when we send emotions, feelings, sensations
00:01:30.640 | on the internet, and we will telepathically communicate
00:01:34.600 | with other humans this way.
00:01:37.560 | This is gonna affect everything.
00:01:39.120 | Look at entertainment.
00:01:40.440 | Remember the silent movies?
00:01:42.040 | Charlie Chaplin was very famous
00:01:44.200 | during the era of silent movies,
00:01:46.000 | but when the talkies came in,
00:01:47.940 | nobody wanted to see Charlie Chaplin anymore
00:01:50.980 | because he never talked in the movies.
00:01:53.600 | And so a whole generation of actors lost their job,
00:01:56.840 | and a new series of actors came in.
00:01:59.340 | Next, we're gonna have the movies replaced by brain net,
00:02:04.340 | because in the future, people will say,
00:02:07.440 | "Who wants to see a screen with images?"
00:02:11.080 | That's it.
00:02:11.920 | Sound and image, that's called the movies.
00:02:15.240 | In our entertainment industry,
00:02:16.920 | this multi-billion dollar industry is based on screens
00:02:20.200 | with moving images and sound.
00:02:23.520 | But what happens when emotions, feelings, sensations,
00:02:27.880 | memories can be conveyed on the internet?
00:02:31.160 | It's gonna change everything.
00:02:32.720 | Human relations will change,
00:02:34.200 | 'cause you'll be able to empathize
00:02:35.660 | and feel the suffering of other people.
00:02:38.200 | We'll be able to communicate telepathically,
00:02:41.200 | and this is coming.
00:02:44.120 | - You described brain net in "Future of the Mind."
00:02:46.600 | This is an interesting concept.
00:02:48.900 | Do you think, so you mentioned entertainment,
00:02:51.840 | but what kind of effect would it have
00:02:54.120 | on our personal relationships?
00:02:56.560 | - Hopefully, it will deepen it.
00:02:58.320 | You realize that for most of human history,
00:03:01.320 | for over 90% of human history,
00:03:04.720 | we only knew maybe 20, 100 people.
00:03:09.720 | That's it, folks.
00:03:11.460 | That was your tribe.
00:03:12.960 | That was everybody you knew in the universe
00:03:16.360 | was only maybe 50 or 100.
00:03:19.660 | With the coming of towns,
00:03:21.160 | of course, it expanded to a few thousand.
00:03:23.560 | With the coming of the telephone,
00:03:25.400 | all of a sudden, you could reach thousands of people
00:03:28.480 | with a telephone, and now with the internet,
00:03:30.600 | you can reach the entire population of the planet Earth.
00:03:33.600 | And so I think this is a normal progression.
00:03:36.320 | - And you think that kind of sort of connection
00:03:40.240 | to the rest of the world,
00:03:41.840 | and then adding sensations,
00:03:43.280 | like being able to share telepathically emotions and so on,
00:03:46.800 | that would just further deepen our connection
00:03:49.100 | to our fellow humans?
00:03:50.840 | - Yeah, that's right.
00:03:51.680 | In fact, I disagree with many scientists on this question.
00:03:55.600 | Most scientists would say that technology is neutral.
00:03:59.120 | A double-edged sword,
00:04:00.520 | one side of the sword can cut against people,
00:04:03.880 | the other side of the sword
00:04:05.300 | can cut against ignorance and disease.
00:04:08.760 | I disagree.
00:04:10.360 | I think technology does have a moral direction.
00:04:13.840 | Look at the internet.
00:04:15.300 | The internet spreads knowledge, awareness,
00:04:18.720 | and that creates empowerment.
00:04:20.960 | People act on knowledge.
00:04:23.340 | When they begin to realize
00:04:24.680 | that they don't have to live that way,
00:04:26.460 | they don't have to suffer under a dictatorship,
00:04:29.000 | that there are other ways of living under freedom,
00:04:32.500 | then they begin to take things, take power,
00:04:35.640 | and that spreads democracy,
00:04:37.520 | and democracies do not war with other democracies.
00:04:42.160 | I'm a scientist.
00:04:43.200 | I believe in data.
00:04:45.080 | So let's take a sheet of paper
00:04:47.000 | and write down every single war you had to learn
00:04:51.720 | since you were in elementary school.
00:04:53.840 | Every single war, hundreds of them,
00:04:55.760 | kings, queens, emperors, dictators,
00:04:59.000 | all these wars were between kings, queens,
00:05:01.560 | emperors, and dictators,
00:05:03.180 | never between two major democracies.
00:05:07.800 | And so I think with the spread of this technology,
00:05:10.500 | and which would accelerate with the coming of brain net,
00:05:14.080 | it means that, well, we will still have wars.
00:05:16.420 | Wars, of course, is politics by other means,
00:05:19.480 | but they'll be less intense and less frequent.
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