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A thread about why the idea of empathy may be the most misunderstood existential threat we face
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Step back from personal feelings of being judged & consider, for example, that the existence of systems like Six Thinking Hats is compelling evidence of the humanity-wide lack of empathy
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Rather than saying people in small groups lack empathy, it may be more explanatory to accept that no one has empathy but (as my spouse puts it) those in large groups don’t notice most of the time because it’s hidden by the fact most people they meet think like they do
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To feel the same way as someone else is not empathy, it’s coincidence. Empathy would be to get inside another head and feel as it feels. It is not misunderstanding that refutes this so much as surprise.
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But as a species we persist in believing in empathy. Like capitalism, it is a tool an in-group uses to atomise minorities in order to maintain power – and in doing so to mask the individualisms of which it is comprised
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As we enter a machine learning age, the concept of empathy becomes more dangerous. Machine learning acts, in effect, as a gearing mechanism for its dangers
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In-groups who use the concept of empathy do so to gaslight the experience of others – “we empathise with you, therefore when you tell us we don’t understand you, you are lying about your own feelings because you don’t understand our empathy”
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This transfers to machine learning “we can engineer out biases in data because we understand what those biases are & will correct for them. You’re wrong when you say algorithmic harms may elude bias-engineering because you don’t understand that we engineer biases out”
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Empathy was always an invention and a weapon used to gaslight out-groups and maintain power structures. The potential of algorithms to magnify that weaponisation is what makes it an existential threat
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It is also a reminder that the answer is not “empathy”. That’s the problem. The answer is inclusion. Of all voices. If the danger is a fictional empathy that masks the collective interest of in-power-groups the only answer is a true commons that co-creates the future
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