Michio Kaku describes brain-computer interfaces moving from mice to humans, including a memory chip for Alzheimer's patients. He envisions Brainnet: sending emotions and memories across the internet to replace movies and create telepathic empathy between people.
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 going to 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 Brainnet. Brainnet is when we send emotions, feelings, sensations on the Internet and we will telepathically communicate with other humans this way. This is going to 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 going to have the movies replaced by Brainnet because in the future people will say, who wants to see a screen with images? That's it. Sound, an image that, that's called the movies. 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 going to change everything. Human relations will change because 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 Brainnet 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 2100 people? Yeah, 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 the 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 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 and 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 Brainnet, it means that, well, we will still have wars, wars of course, as politics by other means, but they'll be less intense and less frequent.
