BEATRIZ ZANFORLIN

Before language, you had to act to show what you wanted. If you wanted to go to the lake to drink water, others could only decide to follow or not, there was no way to share intentions or deliberate. Groups were able to organize collective behavior either by inventing literacy or by having autocratic leadership – like birds in a flock follow a leader or like an alpha in a group of monkeys.

Still today, most world problems arise from a lack of information. From simple things – when to leave the beach to avoid traffic, which restaurant has no wait – to whether to sell stocks or plant corn, depend on knowing others’ plans. If everybody shared their intentions, there would be more collective organization (whether that’s something everybody wants it’s another story, as many profit from the asymmetry).

For a long time, distance was the real barrier. Information couldn’t travel quickly or globally. That’s now solved. Transmission instantaneous. If someone shares and you’re ready to receive, the message arrives.

So the bottleneck has shifted. It isn’t transmission anymore. It’s attention. We can’t process everything. And we can’t update others on every small intention. You might share a big decision, but not that you’re leaving the beach at 4 p.m. or that you’re buying rice today. Yet those tiny updates are exactly the ones others might need to make their decisions.

Our communication is limited by how fast we can read, write, speak, or listen. One way to speed it up is through symbols. Symbols compress meaning—you see them, and the idea lands instantly. In contrast, phonetic language takes longer because you need to say each word. Saying ‘trash can’ takes longer than recognizing a trash can icon. The difference might be of milliseconds, but it adds up.

The problem is that symbols don’t scale well. They fragment across groups, meanings diverge, and learning them all is too much.

Which leaves another path: finding entirely new ways to communicate, beyond language itself. Telepathy no longer sounds impossible. If thoughts could move at the speed of thought, communication would be instant.

Raw telepathy would be overwhelming. You don’t want every thought in your head, nor the noise of billions of others. What’s needed is a filter: a tool that captures your intentions automatically, stores them outside your awareness, and delivers only what’s relevant. You wouldn’t get floods of raw data, but distilled insights, surfaced when your attention turns to a specific domain—organized by AI. 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.

Given how much loss comes from missing information, the world will keep trying to close these gaps. Transmission is solved. Attention is the bottleneck. Once we exhaust symbolic shortcuts and language optimizations, the next investment will be clear: telepathy.