Ran into a new Science Magazine book review. Another one jumps the rope line...
Can AI Help Us Conquer Fear?
In the era of AI media, what is most crucial to remember is that the enemy of fear, divisiveness, polarization, and hatred is empathy. Being able to see things from another’s frame of mind, to feel how they feel—that is empathy, and it’s what changes a dehumanized object from your out-groups into a human in your in-group.
AI needs to be helping us humans to develop empathy.
Because empathy is hard: it’s expensive; it’s far easier when safety and security are plentiful; and it’s affordable only to those with sufficient means.
We’re not talking just about sympathy. Sympathy is when you react to someone’s feelings and thoughts from your own perspective—for example, showing pity or offering soothing words or mannerisms. Empathy, in contrast, is when you share someone’s feelings and thoughts from their perspective.
Nor are we talking about knee-jerk unconscious reflexive affective empathy, like when you feel sad when someone cries. Or when you wince if you see someone trip and fall. Or when your heart swells up watching a sweet kid being happy to receive an award. (This kind of emotional empathy has been theorized to be related to what’s called mirror neurons.)
Rather, we’re talking about conscious cognitive empathy, where you truly take yourself out of your own in-group’s tribal mindset and instead put yourself in the head and heartspace of a culturally different out-group, of another tribe.
Conscious empathy requires carrying a heavy cognitive load, heavier than those who are struggling to feed themselves and their families can typically afford to do take on.
But just as with other cognitively expensive and difficult tasks—like the maps and contact books on my phone—AI can help us.
We can no longer afford the “us and them” mindset. “From me to we” is a cliché we need to take much more seriously. We need AI to help us to make the cognitively challenging shift toward empathy so that it becomes far more broadly accessible.
Human culture is heavily based on linguistic constructs: language shapes how we frame ideas, aspirations, concerns in ways that invoke either fear or trust or joy or anticipation or some other response and promote mindsets such as “abundance versus scarcity.”
My research pioneered global-scale online language translators, which spawned AIs such as Google and Microsoft and Yahoo Translate. But today our research program has been making an even more ambitious paradigm shift to advance from just language translation to cultural translation because in the AI era it is crucial that we develop AI to help humans with the cognitively difficult task of better understanding and relating to how out-group others frame things.
We need AI to be democratizing empathy rather than WMDs. We must stop AI-powered fearmongering from driving our civilizations headlong into mutually assured destruction. Even if all our many cultures don’t agree on everything, we need AI to help us with listening to each other, suspending our fear.
And we all need to be a part of this cultural shift. It takes a village.
Kai, De. Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future (pp. xiii-xv). (Function). Kindle Edition.