- How promising in the near term, in your view, is brain-machine interfaces? So starting to allow computers to talk directly to the brains, Elon Musk is working on that with Neuralink, and there's other companies working on this idea. Do you see promise there? Do you see hope for near-term impact?

- Well, every technology has pluses and minuses. Already, we can record memories. I have a book, "The Future of the Mind," where I detail some of these breakthroughs. We can now record simple memories of mice and send these memories on the internet. Eventually, we're gonna do this with primates at Wake Forest University and also in Los Angeles.

And then after that, we'll have a memory chip for Alzheimer's patients. We'll test it out in Alzheimer's patients because, of course, when Alzheimer's patients lose their memory, they wander. They create all sorts of havoc, wandering around, oblivious to their surroundings, and they'll have a chip. They'll push the button, and memories, memories will come flooding into their hippocampus and the chip, telling them where they live and who they are.

And so a memory chip is definitely in the cards, and I think this will eventually affect human civilization. What is the future of the internet? The future of the internet is brain net. Brain net is when we send emotions, feelings, sensations on the internet, and we will telepathically communicate with other humans this way.

This is gonna affect everything. Look at entertainment. Remember the silent movies? Charlie Chaplin was very famous during the era of silent movies, but when the talkies came in, nobody wanted to see Charlie Chaplin anymore because he never talked in the movies. And so a whole generation of actors lost their job, and a new series of actors came in.

Next, we're gonna have the movies replaced by brain net, because in the future, people will say, "Who wants to see a screen with images?" That's it. Sound and image, that's called the movies. In our entertainment industry, this multi-billion dollar industry is based on screens with moving images and sound.

But what happens when emotions, feelings, sensations, memories can be conveyed on the internet? It's gonna change everything. Human relations will change, 'cause you'll be able to empathize and feel the suffering of other people. We'll be able to communicate telepathically, and this is coming. - You described brain net in "Future of the Mind." This is an interesting concept.

Do you think, so you mentioned entertainment, but what kind of effect would it have on our personal relationships? - Hopefully, it will deepen it. You realize that for most of human history, for over 90% of human history, we only knew maybe 20, 100 people. That's it, folks. That was your tribe.

That was everybody you knew in the universe was only maybe 50 or 100. With the coming of towns, of course, it expanded to a few thousand. With the coming of the telephone, all of a sudden, you could reach thousands of people with a telephone, and now with the internet, you can reach the entire population of the planet Earth.

And so I think this is a normal progression. - And you think that kind of sort of connection to the rest of the world, and then adding sensations, like being able to share telepathically emotions and so on, that would just further deepen our connection to our fellow humans? - Yeah, that's right.

In fact, I disagree with many scientists on this question. Most scientists would say that technology is neutral. A double-edged sword, one side of the sword can cut against people, the other side of the sword can cut against ignorance and disease. I disagree. I think technology does have a moral direction.

Look at the internet. The internet spreads knowledge, awareness, and that creates empowerment. People act on knowledge. When they begin to realize that they don't have to live that way, they don't have to suffer under a dictatorship, that there are other ways of living under freedom, then they begin to take things, take power, and that spreads democracy, and democracies do not war with other democracies.

I'm a scientist. I believe in data. So let's take a sheet of paper and write down every single war you had to learn since you were in elementary school. Every single war, hundreds of them, kings, queens, emperors, dictators, all these wars were between kings, queens, emperors, and dictators, never between two major democracies.

And so I think with the spread of this technology, and which would accelerate with the coming of brain net, it means that, well, we will still have wars. Wars, of course, is politics by other means, but they'll be less intense and less frequent. (silence) (silence) (silence) (silence) (silence) (silence) (silence)