Prepare for Telepathy Culture

We are in the midst of a great transition—one just as great as the transition from being an oral culture to a written culture.

We are transitioning to a transmedium culture. Just like how so much was lost when we left our oral roots, I do believe we are going to lose something important as we move away from being a written culture.

Oral cultures could remember long stories and pass them down nearly perfectly for generations. I believe that written cultures have a thoroughness to them that we may very well be at risk of losing.

You might be asking what I’m talking about, and why I think there’s a transition coming—or happening right now. The fact is that we can speak much faster than we can write, and we can read much faster than we can listen. The bulk of modern communication has become asynchronous, so people are going to opt for the medium that they are fastest in—and that is most convenient to them—for whichever action they are doing: input or output.

Increasingly, people are using voice transcription so that they can speak every thought they have while AIs write them down. I know that I find myself frequently giving prompts to AI through voice commands that are transcribed into text. But I do notice that when I write a prompt by hand, it is often much more thorough. I’m forced to think much more carefully about exactly what I’m saying and how I’m saying it.

While this same thoughtfulness can likely be cultivated in spoken transcriptions, there is a certain texture to writing something—the act of seeing it on your screen as you’re writing it, and reflecting on it slowly, as you read your words over and over again with each additional word you put onto the screen.

I think it is effectively inevitable that we will lose some thoroughness and some carefulness, and that is just a trade-off that we are likely going to have to accept.

I do think it’s important to get used to this now, because it is preparation for the next transition: the transition to a telepathic society. Every big tech company now is focusing on brain-computer interfaces. Telepathy is going to be the highest-bandwidth way for people to communicate with AIs and each other.

It’s going to be very primitive at first. It’s probably just going to take your direct thoughts and convert them into text that is broadcast to your recipients—and then beamed into their heads as a voice reading those texts aloud.

But many people think in different ways about different things. Some people think in shapes, some people think in images, some people think in sound and music. And I believe that we will be able to directly communicate those different modalities to each other in real time. Once we go there, there really is no going back.

Even what we are doing now—voicing our direct thoughts, just as I am voicing my direct thoughts into a microphone that is transcribing this very article right now—will be looked back upon as relatively quaint.

I know there are many of you who fear this transition to telepathy. You are worried about the privacy of your thoughts. You are also worried about the impurities of your thoughts. This is very natural.

However, I do think that people who do not hold these fears will be enormously advantaged because their speed will not be hampered. Therefore, I would recommend finding some practice that will help you discipline your mind now—whether that be the Eightfold Path, meditation, yoga, or prayer, whatever it may be—that will make your mind completely clear so that you can directly express your intentions easily and clearly.