[ExI] The telepathic communication era

[BillK]

On 9/11/09, Giulio Prisco wrote:
<snip>
>  Everyone’s mind will be permanently linked to the wireless Internet,
>  and through the Internet to everyone else’s mind. This will trigger
>  very radical changes. In particular telepathic groups—able to
>  instantly share and elaborate thoughts—will produce an enormous
>  acceleration in the development and deployment of new ideas, and cause
>  the emergence of “group minds”. And once neural communication is
>  sufficiently deep, accurate and fast, it will be possible to transfer
>  the informational content of a person’s brain, with memories, thoughts
>  and feelings, to a higher performance storage and processing device.
>  This “mind uploading” technology may eventually provide practical
>  immortality.
>


Now just slow down there for a minute.    :)

I have always found that the biggest problem with telepathy is
building firewalls against the torrent of drivel, nonsense, coercion,
etc. streaming out from neighboring minds.

Twitter is a bad example to use. It is mostly a broadcast system with
a few users producing most of the tweets.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8089508.stm>
Quote:
Micro-blogging service Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite
the hype surrounding it, according to research.
Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a
Harvard study of 300,000 users found.
------------

And another analysis showed that only 8.7% of tweets had 'value' content.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8204842.stm>
Quote:
A short-term study of Twitter has found that 40% of the messages sent
via it are "pointless babble."  Almost as prevalent as the babble were
"conversational" tweets that used it as a surrogate instant messaging
system.
The study found that only 8.7% of messages could be said to have
"value" as they passed along news of interest.
--------------------

'Telepathic' groups are more likely to degenerate very quickly into
random noise, with your 'deep thinkers' disconnecting in
self-preservation. Mailing lists are bad enough - and there you have
time to think before posting a response!  Just imagine what an instant
mailing list would be like, with everyone shouting simultaneously. Oh,
I forgot. We have that already. It's called Usenet (or forums).
Without a very aggressive moderator, just forget it.

BillK