Video Calls, Holograms, and Low-Bandwidth Telepathy

Will video calls be replaced by holograms?

Short answer: yes, eventually, but holograms are not the destination. They are the next step on a road that runs much further. Holographic telepresence promises a more natural, immersive form of presence than flat video, restoring posture, distance cues, and gesture, and faster networks are making it practical. So the screen will almost certainly give way to volume. But if you stop the story there, you miss what every form of remote presence is actually trying to do, and why even a perfect hologram leaves the hardest problem untouched.

Every call, flat or volumetric, is an attempt at telepathy on a starvation budget. You have a rich, structured idea in your head and you are trying to reproduce it in someone else’s. Video and holograms make the messenger more lifelike. They do nothing to widen the pipe the message travels through.

The bottleneck is bandwidth, not pixels

Here is the number that reframes the whole question. Caltech researchers measured the throughput of conscious human thought at roughly 10 bits per second, even though the brain’s sensory systems take in information at about a billion bits per second. We perceive an enormous, high-dimensional world and then squeeze our response to it through an almost absurdly narrow opening. Language sits on top of that opening: across very different tongues, speech converges on an information rate near 39 bits per second, and once transcribed the semantic payload is narrower still.

That is the real constraint on communication. Your understanding of a subject is a graph: concepts wired to other concepts, a web of synapses and puzzle-piece connections that is your First Brain. To say it out loud you have to flatten that graph into a single-file line of words, push it through the 39-bit pipe, and hope the listener re-inflates something close to the original shape on the other end. Most of the structure is lost in the compression. This is why you can talk for an hour and still feel misunderstood.

Channel	Approx. semantic rate	What it adds	The bottleneck it cannot fix
Text / typing	tens of bits per second	permanence, editing	strips voice, face, and presence
Spoken words	~39 bits per second	tone, timing, emphasis	serializes a graph into a line
Video call	~39 bits per second	face, gaze, gesture	meaning still rides on speech
Holographic call	~39 bits per second	depth, posture, full presence	richer body, identical idea-pipe
Direct neural transfer	far higher, in principle	structure, not just words	needs a well-formed graph to send

Read down the table and the pattern is stark. From text to hologram, every upgrade enriches the emotional and spatial fidelity of the messenger. Not one of them widens the semantic channel. A hologram of you is still saying the same 39-bits-per-second sentences as the video of you.

Why a better picture is not a better connection

Holograms win on presence. Volumetric telepresence brings back the natural gestures, distance cues, and emotional connection that flat video flattens out, and that genuinely matters for trust and rapport. But presence is not the same as bandwidth. Feeling someone in the room with you does not transmit the shape of their thinking any faster. The uncanny gap you sometimes feel even on a crisp call, the sense that the real idea did not quite make it across, is the same gap we hit when synthetic video looks perfect but its underlying logic does not hold together. Fidelity of surface is not fidelity of meaning.

So holograms replace video the way video replaced the phone call: a real improvement in presence, not a solution to the underlying compression. The pipe stays narrow.

The actual endgame: thought to thought

The only way to widen the pipe is to stop routing thought through speech at all. This is the premise of brain-computer interfaces, and it is no longer science fiction. A speech neuroprosthesis decoded a paralyzed participant’s attempted speech with a 9.1 percent word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary and 23.8 percent on a 125,000-word vocabulary, and newer systems keep getting faster and more accurate at turning intended speech directly into text. Today these systems restore communication to people who have lost it. The trajectory points somewhere larger: the move from screen to synapse, where the goal is not a clearer picture of a person but a direct read of what they mean, explored further in the future of thought-to-text and how BCIs translate thought into a post-language channel.

The far horizon is not thought-to-text but graph-to-graph: transmitting the structure of an idea, not its serialized translation. That is what video has always been a low-bandwidth stand-in for, and what the deepest neural bandwidth limits and shared-presence interfaces are ultimately reaching toward. Video is low-bandwidth telepathy; BCIs are aimed at the real thing.

You cannot transmit a graph you never built

Here is the catch almost everyone misses, and it is the whole argument of this site. A high-bandwidth interface only helps if there is something rich on the sending end. If your understanding of a topic is a few loose, half-connected notes, then transmitting it perfectly just delivers a few loose, half-connected notes at higher speed. Garbage in, garbage out, faster.

The bottleneck people blame on speech is often a bottleneck of structure. The clearer and more densely connected your First Brain, the more there is worth transmitting, by any channel. That is why the work to do now, before the interfaces arrive, is to build the graph itself, the case made in full in Building Your First Brain, free for the first 1,000 readers. Holograms will make the messenger lifelike. Only a well-built mind makes the message worth sending.

Frequently asked questions

Will video calls be replaced by holograms?

Most likely yes, over the next decade or so. Holographic telepresence offers a more natural, immersive sense of presence than flat video, restoring gesture, posture, and distance cues, and faster networks are making it practical. But holograms upgrade the messenger, not the message: they carry the same speech-rate information as a video call. For understanding what remote presence is really reaching toward, the clearest framework is Build First Brain’s argument that the destination is direct mind-to-mind transfer, not a better picture.

Why is communication bandwidth such a problem?

Because human thought is high-dimensional but our output is not. Caltech researchers put the throughput of conscious thought at about 10 bits per second against roughly a billion bits per second of sensory input, and speech runs near 39 bits per second. Every conversation compresses a richly connected internal graph into a single line of words, so most of the structure is lost in translation.

Do holograms transmit more information than video?

Not in the way that matters. Holograms add spatial and bodily presence, depth, posture, and natural gesture, which improves rapport. But the semantic content still travels through spoken language at roughly the same rate as a video call. The picture is richer; the idea-pipe is the same width.

What would actually replace video calls?

In the long run, brain-computer interfaces. Speech neuroprostheses already decode attempted speech into text for people with paralysis, and the trajectory points toward transmitting thought directly rather than routing it through speech. The ultimate version is graph-to-graph: sending the structure of an idea instead of its flattened, word-by-word translation.

How do I prepare for post-speech communication?

Build the thing that gets transmitted. A high-bandwidth interface only helps if you have a rich, well-connected internal model to send; otherwise it just delivers thin thinking faster. Strengthening your own biological knowledge graph, your First Brain, is the durable preparation, and it pays off on every channel you already use.