Q&A: Would It Be Better If Communication Were at the Speed of Thought?
Would It Be Better If Communication Were at the Speed of Thought?
Question
Hello,
An article was published yesterday on In Hebrew too: Israeli startup claims it can complete your words better than Google | Geektime
which talks about software that can complete sentences in Hebrew.
At the end of the article it says:
In a conversation with me, Ktavi says that the vision behind this whole thing is to eliminate what he calls the typing bottleneck—the keyboard. “We think at a rate of 2,000 words a minute and write at about 40 words. Typing is a crazy traffic jam between you and the computer,” says Ktavi, claiming that the idea is to be a bit like what Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to do—just without the chip in our brains. “The vision is to take those thoughts and help you convert them into their digital form without having to deal with grammar and syntax, to focus more on the essence and less on the secondary stuff—which is the mechanics of typing.”
So after I read that I thought: if, theoretically, they invented a device that transfers information at the speed of thought—would that be preferable? For example, suppose they invented a device that reads your thoughts and types them directly, or in a lecture the lecturer transmits the information at the speed of thought—would that be a good device that everyone would basically buy, or is there some psychological or other reason for the “slowing down,” such that דווקא a device like that would not be good?
Answer
I don’t know. It depends on exactly how it would be built. If it outputs everything that passes through my head, that’s really not desirable. If it were possible to filter out unwanted thoughts and increase typing speed—that seems excellent to me.
Maybe it would be better if it didn’t filter anything out, but rather the algorithm were programmed to learn to distinguish between decoding the basic thought process and the final refined product—that’s what limits the typed words.
The effect would be not only in speed, but perhaps mainly in the ability to know and communicate many components that exist in thought and do not exist in the final product—speech or typing.