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

by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

Some research has suggested that people who have lived through a particular experience can sometimes be less empathetic toward others going through the same thing.

Excluding women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities from the creation process of tech platforms is in most cases probably not intentional, but including them can be, and often isn’t. The result has been that artificial-intelligence programs do oppressive things like identify black faces as gorilla faces, eliminate résumés with the word “women’s” in them, and push fake and incendiary articles to the tops of our news feeds.

Ultimately their goal isn’t to outsource our emotions to technology, or to make technology more human. It’s to make us more human, with the help of the tools we’ve created without fully knowing how to use them. They want to teach us how to learn from our mistakes, but also how to be prepared to solve the future problems we, humans that we are, will create for ourselves.