The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

This was Facebook, which felt simultaneously like a yearbook and a battlefield.

He was right—I had no idea what it was like to work in law enforcement. And I was right—he had no idea what it was like to be a black man. Neither of us did. So what were we even talking about? Anger? Fear? Respect? Entitlement? Empathy?

Knowing all of this, a lot of critics—some of them former proponents—argue that social media just isn’t the place to try to talk about important things.

Of course, we weren’t built for this—for clutching small rectangular computers all day and using them to communicate with friends, strangers, and algorithms around the world. But this is how we live now.

cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings).

compassion is feeling for someone; empathy is feeling with them.

I’ve never changed anyone’s mind or convinced them to see things my way in these gamified conversations. I never furthered any cause or helped myself come to peace with awful things in the world. I just raised my blood pressure, lost a few friends, and pissed off some family members.

Dozens of articles have been written about the unique tension of a conversation between someone who supports Donald Trump and someone who does not.

I now feel safe saying that almost nothing was gained from these exchanges between strangers, but at the time it felt so urgent.

90 percent of two-year-olds knew how to use tablets,

One popular empathy-building app used by teachers, called ClassDojo, came under heavy scrutiny in early 2018 after a series of articles in the US and UK questioned its practice of gathering behavioral data and images from thousands of students and storing it all in an offshore location.

Pearson conducted a “social-psychological” experiment on thousands of unaware math and science students

some people are more prone to feeling emotionally attached to computers than others.

“For an individual to benefit significantly from ownership of a robot pet they must systematically delude themselves regarding the real nature of their relation with the animal,” he wrote. “It requires sentimentality of a morally deplorable sort” that, should we engage in it, would violate our duty to ourselves to “apprehend the world accurately.”

You Are Jeff Bezos, a simple text-based choose-your-own-adventure game created by writer and editor Kris Ligman and posted to Twitter in October 2018.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy,

What if the consequences weren’t exactly unintended?

If I really were Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, if I had their demographics and backgrounds and experiences and privileges, I might not ever even think to worry about the impact AI could have on my résumé or rap sheet. I’d have concerns, sure, but they would be different. And if I hired mostly people with similar experiences and concerns, would I think twice about the echo chamber this created?

Through his own experience and access to research via his seat on the board of Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, he’s become convinced that many of us currently use social media the way a lot of people smoked in the 1960s. “Cigarettes were part of pretty much the whole twentieth century—part of advertisements, part of pop culture, everything,” he said. “Then researchers figured out, oh, there’s some health consequences to this.”

When looking toward a future in which empathy and technology are intimately intertwined—for good, and not for manipulation—it would be naive to ignore the major players, but it would be even worse to assume they will do what’s right.

The biggest move I made was to deactivate Facebook.

When it comes to adopting new technology, I’ve put together a personal checklist based in part on advice from the people I’ve interviewed and in part on my own intuition. When I hear about a new app, gadget, or tech-based service, I try to ask myself the following questions: How might this improve my life or experience, or those of others? What is the potential for it to be manipulated, and are there safeguards? Is there incentive for the people in charge to monitor this—do they have skin in the game? And ultimately, do I think the rewards will outweigh the risks? Are terms, practices, and concerns transparent and open to critique by users? Does this technology, or do its founders and funders, have a reputation for intentionally or inadvertently harming and marginalizing others? Are they actively working to change/avoid that?