Iāve always wanted to share the stage with
a creepy skull mannequin, by the way. Thatās just fantastic. When I was younger, although not quite so young that I should
really not have known better, I sent one of the most harsh messages I've
ever sent in my life. I'm going to share it with you now. I'm not proud of it, but here it is: āI've blocked you everywhere else, āand now I'm going to block you here too. āMy only regret is that I canāt
block you in real life.ā Past me was a dick. I couldnāt block them in real life, right? Because they were still in the
same social circles, They were still going to get invited to the
same events, still going to be part of the same things, and itās going to be awkward, particularly after I send a message like that. And some folks would say that I should just
get used to it, that I should just be at the peace
with the fact that some people are just jerks, and some personalities clash, but I thought, what if instead:
we use technology to fix that. So my proposal for you tonight is:
blocking in real life. Which has been done in science fiction, right? This is from Black Mirror. But the trouble with science fiction blocking is that they have to make it work on camera, and that means inevitably itās a messy fuzz
of pixels or something like that, and thatās not useful, thatās not helpful. Because a messy block of pixels can still
see you, and you can still see it, and it can still punch you in the face. So thatās not great. But we do have an algorithm for this that
will already work, and Photoshop has it, itās called
content-aware fill, and itās theā¦ āWoo!ā from a Photoshop user there! Although given this audience, possibly the man who created the feature,
we donāt know. I was actually originally in that photograph. There I am, thatās the original. But nowadays itās trivial to just find an
object, paint it out, and there you go. And if you didnāt have those
two identical bushes right there in the middle, you might not even spot that I was never there
in the first place. Now, Facebook already has facial recognition
for people, right? So in theory, you get a photoā¦ hereās
one of me and some friends. You get a photo, you could highlight the person, and you could paint themā¦ Yes, well it doesnātā¦ It does go a little bit Cronenberg sometimes. But in the next few decades weāre going
to figure out how to make much, much deeper connections into the brain. Weāre already starting to see some things
like this. We've been using deep brain stimulation for
Parkinsonās patients since 2006, thatās when that paper was from, and spoiler, or as they insist
on calling it here, āabstractāā¦ Abstract: it works. And we've already got people controlling
robot arms with brain implants, and exoskeletons with EEG caps. Okay, so no-one is actually working
on a neural lace yetā¦ No, of course Elon Musk is working
on a neural lace, because Elon Musk is working on everything
that Iain M Banks ever wrote about. So letās say that it works. Letās say that in the next few decades, over the rest of the century, we get something that starts to make deeper
and deeper connections into the brain. And to start off with itās going to help an increasingly-aging population to deal with
senescence, but eventually it will trickle out to the
rest of us. And I'm willing to bet that humanity wonāt
regress into virtual worlds, because virtual worlds are good
for gimmicky games, but they're not real. Thereās no real human interaction there. And sure, the uncanny valley has pretty much
been solved, right? That is Johnny Depp playing young Johnny Depp
in the latest Pirates movie. But you canāt have that for human interaction. I'm willing to bet thereās the same
uncanny valley effect for talking to someone. You canāt simulate a human without simulating
something thatās very close to human, and that would be unethical,
even if it was possible. But you could hijack the vision centre. You could use all those same
little tips and tricks that the brain has been using for,
well, millions of years of evolution, to just quietly make you not notice things. If you walked here like this, and quietly routed yourself around an obstacle
without even seeing it, you're already using those tricks. And yes, I have footnotes. You could just tell your vision centre to
quietly remove things, or add things in. You could teleport to a remote office by saying
to your implant, or whatever it is, you want to go there. Itād paint your vision with that, and it would paint you into the vision of
the people there. But if you can do that, then you can start to remove things as well. Those implants could use the sort of hacks
that we've talked about to quietly remove objects,
and people, and anything. To start off with, this would just be used
on annoyances. It'd be used on the baby thatās crying on
the plane, it'd be used on the jerk who keeps leering
at you at the bus stop every day. But eventually it'd start
to roll out and roll out, youād be able to block someone. You wonāt appear in their perceptions, and they wonāt appear in yours. And sure, there are going to be people
out there without implants, but increasingly, as it becomes more and more
normalised, like smartphones are today, they're going to find themselves in a kind
of a twilight zone where a lot of people are ignoring them. The same way that people get better
customer service by tweeting someone than they do by calling on a landline. And okay, there are people who are going to
try and get around this, right? There are going to be moments of
human ingenuity thatā¦ It was really expensive to get that photo
made, by the way, just the skywriting costs alone. But in general,
people would be okay with this, because no-one here could tell me the last
person who unfriended them on Facebook, not with certainty. Because you canāt remember everyone youāre
friends with, and you donāt check every day,
and it doesnāt notify you, and itās not particularly offensive
when it happens. They're just not appearing anymore, youāve just forgotten about them. So once weāre happy with that, the technology can start getting
better, and better, and better. It can start blocking objects and concepts
and ideas, and it can start to just
automatically work out the things that your brain flinches away from
and automatically start to block them. And people will start sharing block lists,
right? It wonāt be monolithic, it wonāt be brought in from on high, but you will just tend to block the same things
your friends block, because if you donāt, you keep noticing
the elephant in the room, and you keep being the awkward one at the
dinner party who keeps talking about things that people
donāt understand. Or alternatively your friend is, and will you please shut up about that, Dave, we donāt know what you mean! Literally, we donāt know what you mean. People, shops, homes, offices, entire cities
just quietly erased. Imagine crowds of people just sliding past
each other on the street, just by unspoken, unknown, mutual consensus,
just removing each other. I mean, China MiƩville talked about this
in his book āThe City & the Cityā, right? But those two cities were divided by tradition,
and etiquette, and occasional violent retribution, and tourists just had to fit in ā thereād
be none of that. Instead of going to war, feuding nations could just block each other. And their citizensā implants
would be legally mandated to just quietly edit the other country out. Maybe it gets to the point where you donāt
know the other world exists until you're an adult. Maybe children are just kept from it, because you donāt want to
talk to those people. Until then itās just a rumour, itās just bumps in the night and explanations
for ghost stories. And then you get to being 18, or 21, or whatever, and you have a look in the other world to
see what itās like, and itās terrible. Never ever want to go back there. Theyāll say there are people
who've blocked everyone, and weāll never know for sure. But I could look out at a
full house like this and not know if my eyes are gliding over the
people from another world. Maybe thereās someone else on stage and
I'm just walking and talking around them, because thatās what my implant lets me do. Which means there is
one little question left over: what happens when you edit out the idea of
implants from people who have implants? Because there are going to be people who hate
the idea. Maybe they were fitted with them from birth. Maybe they were given them for work and have
to have them, but they hate the idea that the thing that is heading through their
eyes into their brain isnāt reality. And how would that be any different from me
being on this stage right now telling a story and you immediately dismissing
this as science fiction? Ignore that itch behind your ear,
itās probably nothing. My nameās Tom Scott, have a good night. MATT PARKER: All right! There's your camera... Tom Scott, ladies and gentlemen! My goodness.
Subjective realities man...groovy
The only thing this video does is terrify me of the future knowing how governments can use this to pacify its populace
Yeah this sounds like a recipe for disaster.
For such a charismatic guy in his videos, i met him in real life and he was really shitty. Must have got him at a wrong time I guess!