Year Million - First Season

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You know where this is headed, right?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Jess, your mom's a lightweight.

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.

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

The family that I saw today were really interesting.

The project on Europa, it's amazing.

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.

So, how was your day?

You still haven't upgraded to telepathy?

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.

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.

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.

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.

When our brains are directly linked to the cloud,

then the dream of telepathic communication

will finally be realized.