BEATRIZ ZANFORLIN

Communicating takes time. It needs our attention and mental effort – our cognition and consciousness – , both for receiving what we’re told and what we communicate others.

Symbols convey messages quickly. When you see a symbol, you instantly understand its meaning. In contrast, phonetic language takes longer because you need to say each word. For example, saying ‘trash can’ takes longer than recognizing a trash can icon. Although the difference might be just milliseconds, it adds up in complex communications. The more symbolic a language, the faster it is to transmit the message.

Before language existed you had to act to show what you wanted because you couldn’t communicate intentions. If you wanted to go to a certain lake to drink water, you couldn’t tell others. You had to go, people had to follow you and once they understood, they could express if they liked the idea or not. Groups were able to organize collective behavior either by inventing literacy or by having autocratic leadership – like birds in a flock follow a lead or like an alpha in a group of monkeys – in a scenario in which you don’t have to communicate your intentions because your role is to simply follow.

Many world problems arise from a lack of information or clear intentions. For example, deciding the best time to leave the beach to avoid traffic, choosing a restaurant without a long wait, knowing when to buy or sell stocks, or deciding which crops to plant. If we knew others’ plans and intentions, we could make smarter choices.

Until recently, sharing information globally faced a transmission barrier. It was hard to quickly send details to distant places. Now, this issue is resolved—our cellphones prove it. Whenever someone decides to share something and you’re ready to receive it, the information reaches you effortlessly.

So now the limiting factor has changed – it is not information transmission, but rather our attention. Our constraint is time. We can’t possibly process all the information available to us. Nor do we have the time to constantly update our every intention. Would we bother to share our plan to visit a specific restaurant, leave the beach at a certain time, or purchase grains now? Maybe for significant decisions. But for most things, we likely wouldn’t see the immediate benefit unless it’s something we’re currently interested in. Yet, what we do without a second thought might be valuable to others, but we often don’t take the time to share these moments.

Our communication is limited by how fast we can read, write, speak or listen to speech. To overcome this, we could create more symbolic communication – emojis is a way of doing it. But symbolic communication is more difficult to be spread with equal meaning for all and requires learning way to many symbols – as Chineses proves us. Or, find entirely new ways to communicate, beyond traditional language. The idea of telepathy doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. If we could do telepathy, communication velocity would be the speed of our thoughts. A new potential would be unlocked.

Constantly being aware of every thought you want to share would be overwhelming. And you wouldn’t want to be bombarded with information from everyone around the world. What’s needed is a tool that captures your intentions automatically. This tool would allow others to receive the information, but not in a direct, overwhelming way. Instead, the tool would store the information outside of your consciousness, and when you focus your attention on a specific domain, it would present the relevant information to you from that domain. Not as raw data but as insights generated by AI models.

Considering that the problems caused by a lack of information are significant and generate considerable losses, the world will prioritize solving these issues. Once various strategies have been implemented to address the gaps, the remaining bottleneck may well be the limitations of language itself, as previously discussed. And then will be the time we actually start investing in telepathy.