Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Imagine deep in the future,

you and your loved ones have carved out time

to take in a concert.

But this isn't just your average jam session.

Let me take you behind the scenes.

This is what's actually happening.

You and all your fellow concert-goers,

your brains are hardwired together.

Still not getting it?

For the price of admission,

when all of your brains are connected,

you can be the performer, the audience, the orchestra,

the vibrations in the air itself.

You hear a melody, it sparks an emotion, a memory.

Down the rabbit hole you go.

Imagine literally teleporting yourself to that moment in time

and actually living the experience.

Welcome to your future, in the hive mind.

It's the deep future.

Your body, gone.

You're all computer, all the time.

Your brain is way more powerful

than even a billion supercomputers.

Jobs, food, language, water, even traditional thought,

all of humanity's building blocks,

all that's done.

And you are immortal.

Squirming in your chair yet?

You should be.

This isn't science fiction.

Today's visionary thinkers say it's a strong probability

that this is what your world is going to look like.

Tonight, they'll guide you toward that spectacular future,

and we'll see how one family navigates it,

one invention at a time.

This is the story of your future.

This is the road to Year Million.

MICHAEL GRAZIANO: Human beings are the cooperative species.

I mean, that's what made us so successful.

There's no other species on Earth

that can come together in such groups,

instantly intuit what everyone else is thinking,

and cooperate on large-scale projects.

NARRATOR: That's right, folks, communication is our superpower,

whether it's through the spoken or the written word.

Ever since that first Homo sapien

turned a primal grunt into an actual word,

humans have used word-based language

to make us the alpha species on this planet.

CHUCK NICE: Communication is going exactly

where it's been going since the first primates started talking.

Men will say, 'I don't want to talk about it,'

and women will say, 'Why not?'

Okay, okay, I had to do it.

I'm sorry. I just had to do it.

NARRATOR: We forgive you, Chuck, but he does have a point.

While word-based language may be humanity's superpower,

when communication breaks down, it is also our kryptonite.

Let's go back to scripture.

CHARLES SOULE: The Tower of Babel

is one of those proto myths in human society

suggesting that there was a time

when humans all spoke the same language.

They decided to get together

and do the most incredible thing that they could,

which was to build a tower so high

that it would reach all the way to heaven.

And so they start building this thing and it gets really tall.

But then God looks over the edge of heaven

and says, uh, wait a minute,

this is not what I want to have happen.

And so he does something clever, because he is, he is God.

And he, he makes it so that none of those people

who are building the tower together

speak the same language anymore.

And so the minute they stop being able

to speak the same language,

they can't work together anymore.

And so the Tower of Babel falls

and, and never is able to be built again.

I think it's such a brilliant explanation

of the way that human beings think.

If you could just, could talk to somebody

and make sure that you were understood in a clear way,

I think we'd be able to work together

in a really beautiful way.

I think that'd be incredible.

NARRATOR: You know where this is headed, right?

PETER DIAMANDIS: We're about to see this explosion

in the way we communicate,

and that it's these next 20 or 30 years

that we are really plugging the brain into the Internet.

NARRATOR: We're headed to a future of pure, seamless,

unadulterated communication

that will enable levels of cooperation and intelligence

that will make the Tower of Babel

look like a Lego set.

And the communication revolution has already begun.

Billions are spent every year on communication apps.

Twitter, emojis, Google Translate

are all breaking down language barriers.

But these are just the first baby steps

in the evolution of communication.

Flash forward a few thousand years

and traditional word-based language

will be ancient history.

We'll be communicating effortlessly

and at the speed of light,

and that will seismically transform

the very nature of our existence.

This is how we'll do it.

First stage, telepathy.

Using tiny nanochips implanted in our brains

connected to an ultra-high-speed Internet,

we will finally realize the dream

of actual brain-to-brain communication.

Opening our brains to one another

will be a transformational moment in human communication,

as well as the end of privacy as we know it.

But when we go there we will be ready for the next step,

swarm intelligence.

Combining our high-speed connectivity

with our brain-to-brain communication,

we'll combine our diverse outlooks

to exponentially boost our intelligence

and work together in swarms to solve problems in groups

that we never could alone.

We'll need it when we come face to face with alien intelligence.

Figuring out how to communicate

will require all of our ingenuity

and will only be possible

because of our communication revolution.

And when we've mastered swarm intelligence

and become super-intelligent beings,

the final step in human communication will be

when we merge our minds into a single consciousness.

Like that super-trippy concert we just witnessed.

We'll evolve beyond individuality

and shed our very sense of self.

And when we've united humanity

into an enormous super intelligence,

eliminating the barriers between us,

then we can finally build on our limitless imagination,

and everything will be possible.

So, what will be our Tower of Babel look like

in the future?

Stay with us and find out.

But first let's roll back the clock

to witness the first stage,

when we humans are just beginning to embrace telepathy.

[muffled chatter, laughter]

This is what your future dinner party might look and sound like.

[muffled speech]

Oops, I forgot. Since our brains really do think

faster than we speak, let me slow it down so you can hear.

Our brains work faster than our mouths.

EVA: Mm, it's good, it's really good.

MAN: Jess, your mom's a lightweight.

NARRATOR: How bizarre will it be

when our mouths are used solely for eating and breathing?

In the future, a dinner party will take place

in total silence.

Because words as we know them will disappear.

Tiny chips in our brains will enable us to communicate

telepathically via the Internet.

WOMAN: So, Johnny, did you hear about the tsunami in Morocco?

WOMAN: The family that I saw today were really interesting.

WOMAN: The project on Europa, it's amazing.

NARRATOR: Some people, like Oscar here,

will resist the tech implants,

because it also comes with a risk for hacking,

but we'll get into that later.

OSCAR: So, how was your day?

MAN: You still haven't upgraded to telepathy?

NARRATOR: So how do we get to that telepathic dinner party

in the future from where we are today?

The key will be to find a common language

that can connect all of humanity.

I wonder where we'd find something like that.

NICE: I will say this, and I say it without compunction

and with a great deal of confidence--

the Internet is our universal language.

It's already there.

And you would think that we would now have

this incredible exchange of ideas

and exciting means of transferring information,

but instead what do we do?

We send emojis that talk to us in little faces.

Why? 'Cause they're cute and you can understand them.

NARRATOR: Call them cute or really irritating,

truth is there's no denying the emoji's part of a new grammar

connecting people all around the world

in a way never before seen in history.

And it's just the beginning.

RAY KURZWEIL: We're going to connect our neocortex

to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.

And I'm thinking that it will be a hybrid

of our biological brains,

with the non-biological extension in the cloud.

NARRATOR: When our brains are directly linked to the cloud,

then the dream of telepathic communication

will finally be realized.

THOMAS WEBSTER: It's actually not so far-fetched, I think,

if you think about it.

So if you're able to create nano-implants or nano-sensors

to put in the brain of one person,

and then put it in the brain of another person.

That's a way to communicate in a way

that we have never really thought about

in society so far.

ANNALEE NEWITZ: There are experiments now

where we have brain-computer interfaces,

which really does suggest that

something like telepathy could exist.

BARATUNDE THURSTON: Oh, that's so dangerous.

Oh, man, we're going to have so many broken relationships.

And look at what people tweet.

That takes effort.

You have to launch an app, you know,

open up the compose window, tap out a message, and press send.

And people still say things they regret,

and lose their jobs over it and get divorced over it.

Thinking to communication?

That's, that's real sloppy.

That's going to be a hot mess.

NICE: You know, it's funny,

because here's how telepathy is awesome--

when you're the only person who has it.

[laughs]

When that's like your superpower

and you're going around reading everybody's mind,

but nobody can read yours.

That's when telepathy is great.

NARRATOR: That's probably not going to be how it works.

Telepathy will be accessible to everyone.

But telepathy will definitely require some adjustments,

and there will be growing pains.

It won't be all sitting around the campfire singing Kumbaya.

N.K. JEMISIN: Lord help us, what if something like a Twitter mob

existed for the mind?

Um, no, I can't think of anything more horrific.

But if we could control it,

if it was really just another way of connecting,

like AOL, but you know, instead of 'You've got mail,'

it's, you know, 'You've got thoughts.'

THURSTON: On the other hand,

it could lead to a more subtle set of interactions,

because you would feel the weight not just of your words,

but of your thoughts.

NARRATOR: That will be amazing.

Think of it, instantaneous, immersive,

empathic communication.

Humanity will never be the same again.

But it's not going to be easy.

Wireless devices are manufactured to conform

to an agreed-upon standard, like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

But telepathy involves human beings,

and we can't agree on anything.

ANDERS SANDBERG: The fundamental problem

of brain-to-brain communication is that every brain is unique.

When I think about the concept of a mountain,

I might envision something like Matterhorn,

because I was seeing that as a child.

And my neurons firing when I think mountain,

might be very different from your neurons that fire.

So I need to find a mapping,

so when my mountain neurons fire in a particular pattern,

we can activate the right ones.

That's a very tough machine learning problem.

NARRATOR: And it's not just going to be a tough problem

for machines to learn.

It's also going to be a big adjustment for humans as well.

Not everyone is going to be an early adopter.

There will be those who don't want their innermost thoughts

accessible to others.

Or those worried about hacking, like Oscar,

the patriarch of our future family

who hasn't yet bought into this newfangled technology.

JESS: Hey, did Sajani tell you their news?

EVA: No, what's up?

NARRATOR: Oscar is old school,

but how long can he hold out

when everyone around him is communicating telepathically?

JESS: Damon wants to marry another woman.

EVA: What?

Does he want a divorce?

JESS: No, no, not at all.

OSCAR: What?

JESS: Apparently, they met someone they both like and...

OSCAR: What is it?

EVA: Nothing. JESS: Nothing.

OSCAR: Okay, that's it.

JESS: Dad.

NARRATOR: At some point he might have to give in,

just to join the conversation.

OSCAR: Telepathy upgrade, dosage Oscar.

So, what's for dessert?

NARRATOR: Telepathy is on its way.

When we connect our minds together

it will be a singular moment in human history

sending human intelligence into overdrive;

a first step on our path back to that Tower of Babel.

But it won't come without a sacrifice.

Opening our innermost thoughts to each other

will begin to blur the differences between us

and will be the beginning of the end

to one of our most cherished possessions: our privacy.

NARRATOR: In the future we're headed to a world

where Internet-enabled telepathy

will connect us all brain-to-brain.

This is going to catapult humanity forward

on our journey to that future Tower of Babel.

Just imagine the implications.

GEORGE DVORSKY: You know, just with the flick of a thought,

start to engage in a conversation with someone

miles away, and not even have to talk.

That's going to change a lot of things

in terms of the level of engagement

that we have with others,

and just even the sense of intimacy

that we will have with others.

DAVID BYRNE: Ooh, that's a risky place to go, I think.

Sometimes it might be, benefit both parties

if you withhold a little bit of information

and give it some time.

BRIAN BENDIS: Even as we're sitting here talking,

you're thinking other things about me, right.

You're lost in the little bald spot.

Would you want to share that?

NARRATOR: Bald spot? What bald spot?

I totally didn't even notice.

Okay, yes, it's true, I was thinking about the bald spot.

He has a point.

There are definitely thoughts

I would prefer not to share with the world.

But in this newly highly connected world

where we're communicating mind-to-mind,

we may not have a choice.

DIAMANDIS: In 2010, we had 1.8 billion people connected.

By 2020, 2025, that number is expected to grow

to all 8 billion humans on the planet.

So imagine a time in the near future

where every single person on the planet

is connected with Internet.

And these 8 billion people with a megabit connection

now have access at a brand-new level.

MICHIO KAKU: The Internet will evolve into brain-net.

That is, we'll send emotions, memories, feelings.

And that's going to change everything.

NARRATOR: So if the signal is coming from within our brain,

how do we police what we unconsciously send?

Our deepest thoughts and feelings could be hacked

and littered across the Internet.

Who will have access to these extremely personal

and private parts of ourselves?

How does that change how we communicate?

MORGAN MARQUIS-BOIRE: Privacy is at the heart

of many treasured parts of the human experience,

like love and like family.

It is sort of a basic right of humans.

The worry, of course, about the sort of erosion of privacy

is that it changes, you know,

sort of the nature of who we are as humans,

and the nature of our relationship with others

in ways that are not positive.

We become afraid to think certain thoughts,

because we know that we're constantly being watched.

NARRATOR: You're worried about the government

monitoring your search history.

Well, in the future it won't just be your search history,

it will be your entire history.

And that raises a serious question.

ROSE EVELETH: Are we going to have privacy in the future?

No.

It's just going to be a different conversation.

THURSTON: We've been sold convenience and efficiency

as a tradeoff for letting essentially surveillance,

at scale, into our lives.

So we get free information online,

by giving up our information online.

And if every choice you make is mediated by an algorithm,

from what you eat, to who you love, to where you go to lunch,

then that's kind of a destruction of self

and a destruction of independence and free will

that gets very philosophical at that point.

EVELETH: In the sort of most dystopian version of this,

you're being surveyed all the time.

TREVOR PAGLEN: When you put that picture on Facebook,

it becomes a part of a body of data

attached to that specific person and to the people around them.

NARRATOR: And that's just what's going on today.

ADAM HARVEY: You begin to feel very watched

when you know how powerful computer vision is,

in terms of extracting knowledge and building a narrative.

NARRATOR: In the future, when we communicate telepathically,

technology might stop tracking key words or faces,

and start tracking your thoughts and your feelings.

THURSTON: That's pretty terrifying.

PAGLEN: It's a question of freedom,

and it's a question of rights.

NARRATOR: We risk becoming a kind of surveillance state

in the future.

Some say we already are.

And as we spend more and more of our time online,

watching and learning on the Internet,

the Internet is also watching and learning us.

It's a two-way street.

And that could be a frightening proposition.

♪ ♪

PAGLEN: For a number of years in studio,

we've been developing tools to work with machine vision.

NARRATOR: Trevor Paglen is an artist in San Francisco.

And he created this performance piece

with the famed Kronos Quartet.

It looks like a normal concert, right?

Except it's anything but.

These musicians are being watched,

and not just by the audience.

Cameras project the performers on the screen,

and using algorithms, interpret what they're seeing.

PAGLEN: You start to see a very sharp contrast

between how you, as a human audience,

are perceiving the performance,

and how these machinic forms of seeing

are perceiving the performance.

NARRATOR: As you can tell, it's not always completely accurate.

But using facial recognition software,

Trevor is using this performance

to demonstrate how computers watch and record us.

And just how easy would it be for computers

to build a digital profile of us based on algorithms

that may or may not have our best interests in mind.

PAGLEN: My concern is that this very intimate quantification

of everyday life

adds up to an extremely conformist society.

It's very easy to imagine a future

in which you put a picture of you drinking a beer on Facebook,

that automatically translating

into an increase in your car insurance.

NARRATOR: That's bad, but it could get much worse.

KAKU: Let's say a crime is committed,

and the CIA or the FBI wants to have access to everyone

who has an inclination to do something

like the crime that was just committed.

It scans a database of everybody,

and then just prints out the names.

And you could be totally innocent

and your name could be picked out.

NARRATOR: You might be thinking of Edward Snowden right now.

You can see how, unchecked, this kind of access and power

is wide open for abuse.

NEWITZ: How do we make sure that this kind of technology

isn't being used to categorize people unfairly?

It leads right into issues around racial profiling,

it leads into issues

around other kinds of profiling as well.

NARRATOR: And what about identity theft?

Sure, it's a problem today,

but when the Internet is a part of your brain,

hackers might just not be able to steal your data,

they might also be able to hack your mind!

MARQUIS-BOIRE: As anyone who's sat in a plane

and worried about the hundreds of thousands of lines of code

that keep them floating in the air,

you know, similarly,

the exploitability of our digital lives

is something that, you know,

it's sort of like an ever-pressing concern

in the back of my mind.

NARRATOR: These are serious issues with major repercussions

that our newly connected society

is going to have to grapple with,

because the Internet isn't going anywhere.

BRYAN JOHNSON: In the history of the human race,

we have never stopped the development of a technology.

No matter how dangerous it is,

we have never been able to stop it.

NARRATOR: The trend of human history

is greater and greater connection.

There's no turning back.

We have opened the Pandora's box.

DIAMANDIS: I see us going,

over the next 30, 40 years at the outmost,

from individuals, me and you,

to a meta-intelligence, where 8 billion people are plugged in,

through the cloud, knowing each other's thoughts and feelings,

and becoming conscious at a brand-new level.

NARRATOR: Our current notion of privacy will be ancient history.

But that is a sacrifice we'll have to make,

because we will gain so much more in our new open society.

SANDBERG: One could imagine a world

where thoughts are flowing freely between different minds,

but different minds are solving problems

or looking at things from a different perspective.

NARRATOR: When we master telepathy and redefine privacy,

we'll be on our way to that shining tower of the future.

What comes next?

A revolutionary form of communication

that will unlock the collective power

of our supercharged brains.

Nothing can stop us when we launch human cooperation

into overdrive with swarm intelligence.

NARRATOR: They say two heads are better than one.

Well, in the future we're not going to settle for just two,

try 200, 2,000, 2 million!

Powered by high-speed Internet connected directly to our brain,

we'll all be communicating telepathically

and working together at the speed of light.

And that's going to blow the walls

off what humanity is capable of.

And whom does the hyper-connected,

telepathic society of Year Million

have to thank for their superpower?

That's right, bees.

Welcome to swarm intelligence.

['Flight of the Bumblebee' playing]

LOUIS ROSENBERG: Bees go out,

and every year they have to find a new home.

And so what they do is they form a swarm.

And that swarm will negotiate

and find the best possible site among all the options.

And what's amazing is that an individual bee can't conceive

of the problem of finding the best possible site.

But when they work together as a swarm,

they converge on that best answer.

EVELETH: You might know a ton about Chinese geography,

which I don't know anything about.

And I might know a ton about krill,

and you might not know anything about that.

I actually do know a lot about krill.

And then together, we're really good at Jeopardy,

or whatever it is, you know.

And that's kind of the idea, right?

THURSTON: Connectivity breeds connection.

I think that there's something real powerful,

if thought becomes communication.

ROSENBERG: 'Cause ultimately,

it's about collecting input from diverse groups.

NARRATOR: For animals, the key to swarm intelligence

is rapid communication within the group.

One of the things that's held back humans

from tapping the full potential of swarm intelligence

is our traditional word-based language.

Powerful as it is, it's just too slow.

JOHNSON: Right now, we communicate

at something like 40 to 60 bits per second via voice.

But our brains can process information much faster.

ROSENBERG: If we're trying to solve problems,

and we work together as a system,

we should find solutions to problems

that over time, as technology becomes more seamless,

they'll just think, and they'll think together as a system,

they'll think together as a swarm,

and they'll converge on answers

that optimizes the satisfaction of the whole population.

SANDBERG: Once we figure out the science

of deliberately swarming people,

we're going to unleash

a tremendous form of collective intelligence.

NARRATOR: Swarm intelligence could well be the only way

in the far future

that we can compete with artificial intelligence.

When we combine our collective brain power together,

it will be like millions of incredibly powerful computers

uniting to solve the world's most pressing problems.

Like how to house refugees whose homes have been destroyed by war

or the effects of an increasingly warming planet.

[muffled voices]

This is what swarm intelligence may look like in the future.

Jess is telepathically swarming with other people

around the world

trying to come up with a solution to a refugee crisis.

But where are my manners?

Let me slow this down again so your minds can process it.

Really, this conversation happened in the blink of an eye.

MAN: Another tsunami in less than a month.

WOMAN: Not to mention the hurricanes in North America.

WOMAN: And the drought in Central Asia.

MAN: Climate change is wreaking havoc in our cities.

WOMAN: Millions of people have been displaced.

JESS: We have to do something to help them.

MAN: Can we stabilize the climate?

WOMAN: Eventually, yes, but in the meantime?

JESS: These people need homes. What can we do?

WOMAN: We redesign major cities.

MAN: Relocate to other planets.

WOMAN: Too much time.

JESS: There has to be an inexpensive and quick solution.

NARRATOR: Working together as a swarm,

they're able to come up with a creative and fast solution

to save the planet.

MAN: We need mobility.

JESS: Mobile.

MAN: Inexpensive.

WOMAN: Clean energy.

JESS: That's it!

NARRATOR: This is the future of communication and cooperation.

JEMISIN: We've got the potential to harness

a tremendously democratizing force.

A planet-wide e-democracy.

Which would be awesome,

if we can manage to do it in a way that's safe.

NARRATOR: Swarms of doctors could find cures for diseases

faster than they could alone.

Swarms of engineers could invent machines and build structures

no individual can imagine.

The bigger and more connected the swarm,

the more powerful it could be.

But like anything powerful,

there is a dark side to the swarm.

NEWITZ: As we all know, big groups of people

sometimes get together and, you know, do really dumb things.

NARRATOR: The Internet is already full

of hackers and trolls.

Now imagine a global swarm of snooping hackers,

connected directly to your brain.

AMY WEBB: As with everything,

there is the technology and then the way that we use technology.

MARQUIS-BOIRE: Technology acts as a power amplifier, right?

And so it is neither sort of inherently good nor bad.

It's simply a tool that amplifies the desires

of the individual or the institution.

WEBB: Part of our obligations as humans

is to inject ourselves in the process.

THURSTON: We have to learn from the mistakes we've made

with past technologies and with past human interaction.

NARRATOR: Swarm intelligence is powerful,

and we'll have to make sure that

we use our massive new intelligence

to unite humanity, not to oppress others.

But the true test of our elevated ability to cooperate

will come when we encounter something other than ourselves.

That's right. Aliens.

KAKU: Let's say one day we're scanning the heavens,

and we pick up a regular message.

Not random noise, but a regular message.

[humming tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind]

SOULE: Something like that, right?

KAKU: That, of course, is going to be earthshaking.

NARRATOR: It certainly will be.

How will we communicate with them?

Understanding what extraterrestrials are doing

in the skies above us will be a major test

of our newfound communication skills.

It may be the difference between survival and extinction.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: As we trip the light fantastic

down the path to Year Million,

toward a time when we can build

our very own tower to the heavens,

communication will be completely redefined.

But let's be clear when we talk about the Year Million.

We're not really talking about a specific year.

It's our way of saying a future so different, so transformative,

that it's just a glimmer on the horizon of our imagination.

And only the boldest thinkers are able to see

where we're headed.

We just might make some astounding discoveries

along the way.

KAKU: I'm going to stick my neck out

and say that we will probably make contact

with an extraterrestrial civilization.

That's going to be one of the greatest turning points

in human history.

Every single historical account of the evolution of our species

will have to take into account

the fact that we have finally made contact

with another intelligent life-form.

NARRATOR: And when that day finally arrives,

the question is, what then?

EVELETH: You want to make sure that,

like, they don't want to kill you.

Very quickly, as quickly as you can,

you want to make sure

that they are not trying to kill and eat you, right.

NARRATOR: Yes, that would be tops on the list,

I would imagine.

Assuming we get past that, what next?

It could be the greatest moment in human history, or not.

After all, first contact

could be 'Arrival' or 'Independence Day.'

THURSTON: I loved 'Arrival.'

It's about feelings and communication.

EVELETH: 'Arrival' is a great example

of that being patient and trying to actually communicate,

and trying to think about things scientifically

and not rush into anything.

When we are looking at these species or whatever,

aliens that come,

is a better method than just trying to blow them up.

NEGIN FARSAD: I like the idea of aliens being like prettier

than what we've thought of them.

You know, we've kind of made them ugly

over the last several decades.

There's no need for that.

They can actually be quite gorgeous, you know what I mean?

NARRATOR: That's a good point, Negin,

but whatever they look like,

let's just assume for the sake of argument

that first contact with extraterrestrials

goes more in the direction of 'Arrival.'

Then our greatest challenge,

what all of our super-charged intelligence

will need to figure out, is how to communicate with them.

But it's not going to be easy.

Without an Alien Dictionary, where do we even begin?

KAKU: There are three features

that we think intelligent alien life will have.

First of all is vision, some kind of stereovision,

the vision of a hunter.

Second is a thumb, a grappling instrument,

a tentacle of some sort.

And third, a language by which you can hand down information

from generation to generation.

But they're not going to communicate

using American English,

and they're not going to have subject, verb, predicate,

the way we construct sentences.

NICE: I hope, I can only hope

that they all look something like Selma Hayek.

That would be really good.

NARRATOR: We're talking about communication here, Chuck,

let's stick to the subject.

EVELETH: What are the linguistics of this?

What does this actually look like?

How do we figure out,

when they're painting these weird circles,

and we're using these weird lines and sticks,

how do we figure out how to communicate with them?

NARRATOR: How we figure out the aliens' language

will make or break us,

and scientists are already working on it.

How, you might ask?

Well, by taking a page from Dr. Doolittle's book

and starting right here with the animals on Earth.

Dolphins to be specific.

At the National Aquarium in Maryland,

Dr. Diana Reiss and her team are studying dolphins

and how one day we might be able to not just understand them,

but communicate with them.

DIANA REISS: I got really interested

in working with dolphins particularly,

because they were so different from us.

These animals are truly non-terrestrials

in every sense of the word.

ANA HOCEVAR: We're trying to understand

how we could communicate to a completely different species

that is as close to an alien as you can get, for a human.

NARRATOR: 95 million years ago

dolphins and primates parted ways on the evolutionary chain.

But like us, dolphins have big brains

and a sophisticated social intelligence.

So, as far as working with any other animals on the planet,

there is none better suited to being a test case

for learning to speak to aliens than dolphins.

REISS: What we did was we created an underwater keyboard.

It's like a big iPhone.

And if you touch it, something happens.

I want to give us this interface,

a window where we can exchange things.

HOCEVAR: It really opens the door

to understanding their vocalizations.

NARRATOR: Of course! An interspecies iPhone.

Dr. Reiss and her team are hopeful

that this technology will be a platform

in which humans and dolphins

can one day learn to understand one another.

REISS: Wouldn't it be amazing when they hit a key,

it translates to English?

You can hear that and you can respond.

NARRATOR: Amazingly, their efforts

are already being rewarded.

The dolphin have already figured out

that if they touch the screen with their beaks,

they get a reaction.

MATT MIRA: What are dolphins going to be talking about?

Yeah, water's kind of warm today, huh? Yep.

SOULE: I hope that that's basically what they're saying.

These fish are great. I love to swim. Let's jump.

NARRATOR: Or maybe they're discussing dolphin politics

and dolphin philosophy.

We just don't know, but one day we might.

REISS: In a way, the touchscreen is a true window in itself,

into the minds of these animals.

I think technology can make what's invisible to us

perhaps more visible;

what's inaudible to us more audible.

MARCELO MAGNASCO: If we were to succeed,

we would succeed in actually

not being alone in the universe anymore,

which is a pretty sweet thought.

NARRATOR: And that's why

the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI Institute,

has been tracking her work with dolphins.

The challenges she faces are the same ones they anticipate

they'll face when aliens show up.

We'll need a plan.

And this technology just may be the answer.

REISS: The technology that we're developing in these projects

will enable us to see better, to hear better,

to understand better, and to empathize more and care more,

once we have that knowledge.

You know, with knowledge comes great responsibility.

NARRATOR: It certainly does.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

THURSTON: There is a potential for a shared connection

and a shared mindset.

FARSAD: With an interspecies Internet,

we're sort of headed

in this kind of universal one-language scenario.

So if you've ever wanted to talk to a walrus,

in the future, you could do that.

THURSTON: That could be pretty magical.

NARRATOR: Pretty magical indeed.

In the future, we may not agree with dolphins or aliens,

or even walruses on anything.

But as long as we're communicating,

there is always an opportunity for greater understanding,

greater empathy, and greater connection.

And as we travel deeper and deeper into the future,

we'll need to master communication

with all sentient beings

if we ever hope to build our own Tower of Babel in the future.

But we're not there yet.

We're going to connect on a whole other level.

If you thought losing your privacy was a big deal,

the final step is going to be a big pill to swallow.

DVORSKY: You're starting to lose the individual,

and you're starting to now gain

in this kind of massive collectivity,

this, this entity that kind of maybe even thinks

and has impulses and tendencies toward certain direction.

The sum of its intelligence would hopefully be greater

than the sum of its parts.

THURSTON: That's going to change politics, right?

That's going to change relationships.

Could you merge minds?

NARRATOR: Oh, yes, we can, and we will.

In the Year Million era we'll take the final plunge

and shed our ego, our sense of self, our individuality,

and join together in a single consciousness.

It's a high-bandwidth blending of our mind

that creates its own super intelligence,

a consciousness of which each person is just one small part.

Say hello to your future in the hive mind.

NARRATOR: We're almost at the end of our journey

to Year Million

and that future version of a Tower of Babel to the heavens.

And the final step in our communication evolution

is a doozy.

Yep, you got it.

In the Year Million we're not just communicating

telepathically mind-to-mind,

using our hyper-connectivity to swarm together

and increase our intelligence a thousand-fold.

The final step will be when we finally shed our sense of self

and individuality

and merge our minds together into a single consciousness.

DVORSKY: As we become progressively interconnected

with each other,

lines that separate one brain from another brain

will become increasingly blurred.

And if you can imagine, you know,

hundreds or if not even thousands of individuals,

interlinked in this way,

you're going to have what's referred to as the hive mind.

NARRATOR: Whoa, the hive mind.

It sounds scary,

and it just might be, and we'll get to that in a minute.

But it could also be incredibly empowering.

NEWITZ: Basically like what we do

when we create a computer cluster,

putting all the computers together

and having them work together

allows them to do bigger and tougher problems.

NARRATOR: You might say to yourself

that sounds a lot like the swarm intelligence

we talked about, but they are very different.

Swarm intelligence is decentralized.

We will still have our own identity, a sense of self.

Hive mind is a paradigm shift.

We will let go of our egos and come together

to create a centralized consciousness.

When you connect to the hive mind,

you will share everything.

NEWITZ: It could be a really great experience at a concert,

where like all of us are feeling the same thing

as we listen to an awesome guitar solo.

NARRATOR: Exactly, like a concert.

Speaking of which, remember that concert we saw earlier?

Our future family has become part of the hive mind,

and is experiencing a concert through a single consciousness.

BRIAN GREENE: If all those minds

are in some computer digital environment

that allows them to interface in a more profound way

than the biological means that we have at our disposal now,

I can't help but think that that would be a greater level

of collective communication.

NARRATOR: It would be.

And that's why they can be any part

of this little concert they desire.

Plugged in like they are,

their minds will create a larger intelligence,

a larger consciousness.

Our whole idea of what it means to be human

will change drastically,

because when we let go of the ego, the self-preservation,

the competition involved with having a sense of self

and come together as one, well, then everything is possible.

GREENE: There is something very powerful

of all minds working together.

Maybe we'll find, in this domain,

that the notion of decision

is not where we find our individual footprint.

Maybe our individual footprint comes with an outlook

or a perspective that we hold dear,

and only we as individuals are aware of it, or know it.

Maybe that will be enough, perhaps.

NEWITZ: I definitely think it will radically impact

what we think of as a self.

NARRATOR: Take a moment, breathe.

I know, it's a big idea to wrap your head around.

Everything we think makes us human

is tied to our sense of self.

Hive mind won't come without sacrifice.

It will take a complete redefinition

of what it means to be human.

The question is, will it be worth it?

FARSAD: What feels dangerous about the hive mind

is that we'll all, like, just know the same things

and then we won't have anything to talk about.

It'll be so sad, because like the whole point of life

is to just like hang out with your friends.

It's like, talk some smack, you know what I mean,

and if you all already know the thing, you know,

there's no smack to talk,

and that would be very frustrating.

NARRATOR: Frustrating indeed.

What's life without some good old-fashioned trash talk?

Well, we just might find out.

But what about our autonomy?

When we mingle our minds, what happens?

Are we still you and me?

Or do we become the same thing?

NEWITZ: Any technology that we use to mingle our minds

could have good or bad effects.

So you want to be able to step back

and be a little bit skeptical of any kind of groupthink.

MARQUIS-BOIRE: There is the worry

that this connected hive mind can be used in sinister ways,

depending on who's in charge of it.

NARRATOR: That's right, when you're part of the hive mind,

your mind, at least in the traditional sense,

might not be yours alone.

KAKU: You're like a worker bee in a gigantic hive.

You have no individuality whatsoever.

MIRA: You know, if you think about the Borg from Star Trek,

the Borg is the hive mind.

The Borg are a collective,

so they think as a whole and not as an individual.

And in many ways individuality is what makes us feel human.

To have that stripped away and become part of a hive collective

is one of the more terrifying things you could do.

It's like joining a cult.

NEWITZ: The perfect way to get a zombie army would be

string all their brains together,

hook them up to somebody who really knows what they're doing,

and just blasts their brains

with like whatever information they want to give them.

You know, now you must do this labor

in order to exalt the great one.

NARRATOR: That doesn't sound good at all.

What if I want out?

Is there some sort of hive mind eject button?

DVORSKY: One would hope, for example,

that you could perhaps pull out of the hive mind,

that you could remove yourself from the grid.

We struggle with this today,

we turn off our phones or go into airplane mode,

and we feel like we're naked somehow,

or that somehow we're disconnected from the world.

Imagine how terrifying or disconcerting it would be

in the future, if we suddenly, after engaging in a hive mind,

we pulled our self out of it.

NARRATOR: The hive mind sounds like

it could be a deeply oppressive place,

like North Korea but on steroids.

That's the worst-case scenario.

KAKU: But another possibility is that it is freedom,

a world of enlightenment,

a world of knowledge and prosperity.

NARRATOR: When we're all joined together as one,

could we finally eliminate conflict, wars and suffering?

THURSTON: And if you and I are the same,

then when I hurt you, I literally hurt myself.

That changes war, that changes anger, that changes love.

'Cause when I love you, I love myself.

ROSENBERG: We could evolve into something

that we can't even conceive,

into a different type of creature.

This super-organism.

NARRATOR: Might the hive mind even be necessary

for our survival?

I mean, we've come this far alone.

But you know the old saying,

divided we fall and united we stand.

GREENE: To my mind, the only way that we survive

into the far future,

is to bring us all together in some manner

that leverages the whole collective consciousness

in a way that's more powerful than the individual minds alone.

THURSTON: I think that's exciting.

I think it's weird, though.

SANDBERG: I imagine it as a vast coral reef.

Explosion of new forms, new kinds of minds,

new kind of consciousness.

I can't imagine any of the details.

Because I think most of them would be beyond

my puny human brain.

Just like an ant cannot understand a city,

we cannot understand Year Million.

But we can see something there, beyond the clouds.

NARRATOR: That is the future we're barreling toward

in Year Million.

When we are one with animals, extraterrestrials,

and most importantly, each other,

then beyond the clouds may be exactly where we find ourselves.

That's right, we'll be building a new future, our own tower,

perhaps in a far-off distant galaxy,

a gleaming testament

to our brilliant ingenuity and creativity.

We're headed for the stars.

And that will be possible

because of the coming communication revolution

that will take human intelligence

into the stratosphere.