Steve Hoffman imagines brains wirelessly connected to the internet: downloading knowledge instantly, sharing memories as data, and outsourcing thinking to remote servers. He notes that people with photographic memory often struggle with overload, suggesting forgetting is actually functional prioritization. The vision raises questions about privacy and what it means to be human.
Chapters
So what does it mean to connect our minds to the internet? So connecting our brains to the internet is going to radically change how we live. And not just how we live, but how we view ourselves as human beings. So the first thing we'll probably want to do is all of you and everybody else will want to download information like that rat. If we could— if you didn't have to come to Founders Space or Draper University but could download everything that a smart entrepreneur needed to know, would you do it? Yeah. Yeah, you'd probably do it and you'd probably, you know, you would do it, right? You wouldn't even have to go to college. No more exams. You would just know what what you need to know. I mean, I would love that. I hated taking tests. But we all love to learn. We want that knowledge. So the ability to do this, the ability to download information, that is like what the military and other people are— that's their holy grail. They want to be able to give the soldier on the ground, or the fighter pilot, or anybody else information instantly. The other thing you could do is you, without verbalizing anything, you could literally start to talk, communicate with other people. So my lecture, we could all be standing here silently. And I could just be communicating it to you. I could be talking, you would talk to people, they could be, you could literally have conversations with people without ever getting on your phone anywhere in the world. You know, goodbye WeChat or Google Hangouts. We could all just be on our brainwaves, right? Communicating with our friends, they could be dropping in on us. Very strange if we think about it. Sharing memories. Now this is where if you can transfer knowledge and you can communicate because you are connect— your brain is wirelessly connected to the internet, there's no reason you couldn't extract memories, which are just data, out of one brain and put them in another brain. Now, what would it mean to share memories? All of a sudden, Elon Musk, you want to know what he's thinking? You could get his memories from yesterday and live his entire day. If your grandparents or your parents, instead of showing you a photo album, oh, here's a memory of our wedding, and you could have that memory in your brain. You could literally— yes, there's a question. Replace existing memories? So I am speculating here. So I don't know. Like, are our brains— is there capacity? Well, right now, you know, the amazing thing about the brain is we know so little. So I will tell you that there are people who have photographic memories. They can literally store every experience, every minute of their entire life in their brain and access that. But those people who have photographic memories end up having so much data there that they have a hard time prioritizing what's important. And they aren't that functional, a lot of them, in the real world. The more photographic their memory, A lot of times less functional. The reason we forget things is because we want to prioritize the important things and access those when we need it. So your question is very, very— the brain has to have a capacity, right? It can't be unlimited unless there's some other universe that it's transferring this knowledge to, right? Some other dimension. So if it's tied to the physical world, it has a limit. But apparently the limits are much higher than most of us believe, because most of us forget most of the information in our brains simply to make it easier for us to function in the real world. What happens when you start downloading these memories? Do you— maybe it's like a movie. Do you remember all of it? Maybe not. Maybe you experience it and it goes, And it becomes like a movie, you might just remember the highlights of what you experienced. But if you're looking at connecting our brains to the internet, one of the things we'll be able to do is we'll be able to outsource functions of our brain. So we'll be able to outsource, we'll be able to upload our memories to the cloud. So let's say you don't want to— you want that memory forever, right? You're like, it's automatically probably being stored in the cloud for you without you thinking about it. Just like these automatic backups on your computer, You know? Everything, there's a copy, and there's redundancy, and there's like many versions. And so your experience, you could access it later. And they have a Black Mirror episode, I don't know if you've seen it, which is all about this, right? A really cool episode, where, you know, you could replay any memory you have. Definitely, if our brains are connected, we will, that would be a A possibility for something that could happen. You could outsource processing power. Some of us, calculations and things like that, we look at a spreadsheet, and a lot of us, some people can instantly, like some people are savants, they can compute pi to the 100th digit, and they can run math in their head, very complex equations. Other people have a lot of trouble with that, like me. I can't do those amazing math feats, but if we're outsourcing the processing power to the cloud, yeah, all of us could do it. All of us could be geniuses. We look at some real complex integral problem, and it's just solved for us by thinking about it. Yes? So you're saying that if we just give all of our computing power to the cloud,
