|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute
for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 19(1)
– September 2008 |
Empathy in the
Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy
PJ Manney
Chair, World Transhumanist Association
Board of Directors
Journal of Evolution and Technology -
Vol. 19 Issue 1 – September 2008 - pgs 51-61
http://jetpress.org/v19/manney.htm
Abstract
Will the
transhuman technologies that our accelerating future promises enable us to
increase our empathy to others? Or will their use decrease our ability to
understand ‘the other’ that exists outside our own selves, families,
communities and cultures? As the world grows smaller and more connected, humans
will grow ever more divergent because of their possession – or not – of a
multitude of transhuman technologies, and so the role of empathy grows larger
and more important than ever. In theory, sensory/media input stimulates mirror
neurons, which enable empathy.Practically, empathy is created through
storytelling, which is not only the most successful remote means of creating
social empathy, but has actually been the engine of social/cultural
liberalization and change. I will demonstrate both the positive and negative
affects on empathy through the increasing reliance we have on transhuman media
technologies and how I believe storytelling is the key to empathy creation.
In Love in the Time of Cholera,
Gabriel García Márquez (Marquez 1988) joins two seemingly opposing concepts –
love and sickness – and paradoxically unites them in his story as each enabling
the other, as the hero becomes physically ill from his unrequited love and uses
the pretense of mortal illness to be united with his love.
The question that faces humanity in the 21st Century is
equally paradoxical, in that it joins the two seemingly ill-suited concepts of
empathy and technology: will the H+/transhuman technologies that our
accelerating future anticipates enable us to increase our empathy with others
or will their use decrease our ability to understand ‘the other’ that exists
outside our own selves, families, communities and cultures?
Empathy is:
…the projection of one’s
own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him
better; intellectual idenfication of oneself with another. (Webster’s 1979)
As the world grows smaller and more connected, the role of empathy
grows larger and more important than ever. Where no empathy exists, conflict
breeds. However, as our technological connectedness has increased, there does
not appear to be a proportionate increase in global empathy. Instead, we are
living in a time of relatively decreasing empathy, compared to our
connectedness to the greater world. Its lack can be found all around us, be it
in our wars, crime, inequality, anti-social behavior and even the lack of
social consensus within previously homogeneous cultures and the myopic behavior
of the “me generation.”
How we develop and utilize transhuman communications technologies has
enormous implications in our empathetic future, whether it concerns scientists
considering the ethical implications of their own technologies, the creation of
“friendly AI,” or our ability to communicate empathetically via new media – or
new bodies. As the rate of technological change accelerates, the issues
surrounding empathy and their importance will only increase.
Key to understanding how empathy plays out
neurologically is the emerging role of mirror neurons. Discovered in primates
in the 1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti, working with Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio
Gallese at the University of Parma, Italy, mirror neurons are:
…a set of neurons
in the premotor area of the brain that are activated not only when performing
an action oneself, but also while observing someone else perform that action.
It is believed mirror neurons increase an individual's ability to understand
the behaviors of others, an important skill in social species such as humans. (Iacoboni et. al. 2005)
It has also been observed that children with
autism have abnormally low activition in the inferior frontal gyrus
pars opercularis, which contains the mirror neuron system,
while imitating and observing emotions. The lower the activation, the more the
social impairment (Dapretto et. al. 2005). Autism is a condition often
associated with a reduced ability to empathize with others.
Mirror neurons, and therefore empathy, may not
exist only in primates. Mice appear to demonstrate empathy, or at least
effective behavior modeling, although brain scans have not yet been done to
determine the precise location of their empathetic response (Langford et. al.
2006). If mirror neurons are found here as well, it could demonstrate that
empathy is an evolutionary adaptation for mammals in general and increasing
empathy (increasingly effective modeling) seems to correlate generally with
higher levels of organization. If accelerating technology means our own species
and its interactions continue to gain in complexity, then by necessity, we must
increase our levels of empathy to follow suit. If we don’t, we may become unfit
to continue as a species and bring about our own demise.
Empathy and technology have been linked for millennia. As a long time
social and tool-making species, both abilities are evolutionary adaptations for
our collective survival. Empathy and technology became inextricably linked when
information technologies developed. The first great wave of transformative
information technologies happened with the birth of written language, allowing
thoughts to be recorded and referenced later, enabling one to experience the
thoughts of another at any time. The next wave came with the advent of the
printing press and the popularization of vernacular literature as a mass-medium
(Davis 2004). This allowed the mass dissemination of counter-cultural and
liberalizing ideas throughout Western civilization. Some of the most powerful
ideas were distributed through printed stories as novels, the first great mass
entertainment medium.
But what is it in a story that makes us empathize? I believe it is the
imaginative act of the reader translating the words on the page into thoughts
and feelings, enabling them to see the world through the characters’ eyes and
feel their feelings. It is also the recognition that humans share common needs,
goals and aspirations and that these are either met or unmet in the story of
every life, be it real or fictional. Whether the story is a comedy or a tragedy
only depends on the point of view. There could be an entire essay in what will
happen to storytelling itself if H+ technologies allow human consciousness to
achieve a global or cosmic perspective. Regardless, what makes literature such
a potent brew is that we do not suffer these virtual travails in our own
reality. We survive the vicarious experience, which might be devastating to us
in reality, and emerge relatively unscathed, packing storytelling’s virtual
punch.
Storytelling is both the seductive siren and the safe haven that
encourages the connection with the feared “other.” As a reader, I know that I
don’t really have to go to Japan, be sold into human slavery and train to be a
geisha to feel for a geisha’s existence. I don’t even have to speak to a geisha
and risk the mutual embarrassment of cultural or linguistic misunderstanding. I
just have to read Memoirs of a Geisha
and somehow, my appreciation for the travails of women in another culture that
is so alien to mine will grow in ways usually impossible without intense human
contact.
In Pulitzer-prize winner Jane Smiley's (2005) work, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,
Smiley makes a compelling case that the novel as a communication form
has helped cultures create an empathetic response, first through the
readers' relationship with the individual characters in a specific story and
then by repeated novel reading, an activity which creates a generally
empathetic personality in the reader. If you regularly place yourself
in the shoes of different characters and experience empathy for them, this
recurring behavior cannot but help open up your view of the world and create a
more empathetic personality.
Smiley makes the equally compelling case that the history of
the novel is integral to the liberalization of different cultures
(but most dramatically, Western culture) over the last thousand years,
beginning with the first “novels,” Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji and the Icelandic Sagas, written in the 11th
Century. Novels usually present social underdogs as the protagonist, be they
women, children, ethnic/racial/religious outsiders or those who take up their
cause. By finding the historical links between novels and societal change, one
can clearly see the subsequent social evolution made by a culture’s exposure to
specific novels.
In her analysis of one hundred novels, Smiley found the more the
protagonist suffered from, yet overcame, social immorality (deprivation,
disenfranchisement, slavery, sexual/racial/religious/ageist chauvinism or
discrimination, hate, war, etc.), the more successfully the novel changed the
reader's perceptions of what was right and wrong in their society. Think about Uncle Tom's Cabin, Anna Karenina, To Kill a
Mockingbird, all of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Defoe, Zola Neale Hurston,
Sinclair Lewis, E.M. Forster. These works and writers profoundly changed how
their societies viewed what was the moral status quo and while no single work
or author could be pointed to as the lynchpin for social evolution, in the
aggregate, their voices were clearly heard. The exception to this might be
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her
polemic against slavery was so thoroughly read throughout every level of
literate American society, and so thought provoking and galvanizing in its
abolitionist stance in its time, when President Abraham Lincoln met her
years later during the Civil War, he greeted her with the remark, “So this is
the little lady who made this big war.” Such was the power of her single, well
written, well timed novel. Empathy and courage won the day where fear,
ignorance and injustice previously held sway.
How we relate to stories and storytelling can be seen as an
acid-test for empathy. Smiley believes people who do not read novels often lack
this empathetic response, to the point of narcissism. Whether she believes
the narcissist is incapable of novel-reading or that a lack of novel-reading
makes the narcissist, she does not say. Not being a psychiatrist, nor will
I. However, she does make a fascinating observation that the G.W. Bush
administration is the least well-read administration in history. No novels
pass their eyes. When asked during the Gore-Bush campaigns what their
favorite novels were, Al Gore said The
Red and the Black. George W. Bush said The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which is, of course, a children's
picture book and not a novel (or even a story) at all, merely a
colorful exercise in how gluttony can have a positive outcome. Only in
retrospect do we realize the historical ramifications of his choice
(Smiley 2005)! Smiley describes the broader social consequences of a lack of
novel reading:
Those who don't read novels
are condemned to repeat the oldest mistakes in literature – the mistake of
hubris, a Greek mistake, and the mistake of attributing one's own emotions to
God, a Judeo-Christian-Islamic mistake. Pride, arrogance, moral blindness
and narcissism are endemic among humans, especially humans who occupy positions
of power, either in society or in the family... In a world where weapons of
mass destruction are permanent features of the landscape, I cannot help believing
that a lively sense of the reality of other consciousnesses on the part of
those whose fingers are on the trigger is essential to human survival. The
novel has made a world in which people are fairly adept at both feeling and
thinking, and at thinking about feeling... When we talk about the death of the
novel, what we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy,
however minimal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has
died. If the novel has died for the bureaucrats who run our country, then
they are more likely not to pause before engaging in arrogant, narcissistic and
foolish policies. If the novel has died for men (and some publishers and
critics say that men read fewer novels than they used to), then the inner lives
of their friends and family members are a degree more closed to them than
before. If the novel dies, or never lives, for children and teenagers who
spend their time watching TV or playing video games, then they will always be
somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well. If the novel
should die, what is to replace it? (Smiley 2005)
So how does Smiley’s eloquent plea for novel reading as an empathy
engine relate to mirror neurons and H+ technologies? The evolution of mirror neurons and their links to language, emulation and empathetic response make a
powerful case that without the vicarious stimulation of storytelling and
unfamiliar role models, there is little motivation the human brain has to reach
out and feel for “the other.’ Empathy
originally evolved as a result of direct contact, not abstract thought. Whenever empathy evolved in our mammalian
past, it wasn’t thinking we’d be reading Oliver
Twist and feeling sorry for someone we never met, were not related to, had
no chance of actually helping and didn’t actually exist. It had more immediate stimulus in mind: to
learn from and protect the tribe and hence, their genetic offspring. Instead, we now read Oliver Twist and apply those ancient, empathetic impulses to other
orphans, both real and imagined, from a sense of guilt and altruism, just from
reading a book.
Thanks to mirror neurons, as I read, so I am. But since we are discussing advancing technologies, are there
more current media applications than novels (a thousand year-old art form),
which can achieve the same results?
There is a belief among some academics and storytellers that the
non-visual story has a deeper psychological impact than the visual story, since
the non-visual relies on each mind using its personal experience to build its
imagination, making it a more intimate, relatable ‘vision’ with a greater
impact on one’s empathy. In essence, the receiver of the story becomes the
co-creator of the story. (Woodard 2002)
According to this theory, the more senses employed to experience the
story, the weaker the story’s potential empathetic influence. Certainly, from
my own experience, films and plays have great impact, but so far, I can think
of none that has either personally or historically demonstrated any more
empathetic impact than novels.
Historical influence, possibly, if you count propaganda like Triumph of the Will, or sheer reach of
the meme, if you think of the pervasiveness of Star Wars, but not necessarily empathy. If this theory is true, it
might negatively affect the empathetic response derived from the virtual
reality technologies transhumanist are relying on for their vision of an
empathetic future.
Transhumanists often place their faith in the ability of future
technologies to replace more outmoded forms of communication, like those that
rely on the imprecise mechanisms of language, to link their minds in what they
believe will be a more effective connection with others, through a merging of
thought or telepathic link or internalized instant messaging (Kurzweil 2005).
They feel this will increase empathetic responses in people, putting them in
another’s shoes in a simultaneously virtual and visceral way, allowing them to
actually experience being ‘the other.” This is part and parcel of the beautiful
techno-utopian vision of a harmonious and transcendent future. But I do not
believe in holding one’s breath and waiting for a technology that does not
exist and may never fulfill its function to save humanity from itself.
In fact, how we deal with our present media technologies may be a
better indication of our future. And so far, it isn’t looking good. How can we expect techno-utopian
transcendence of human nature through H+ communications technologies when our
present communications are so fraught with fear and conflict? Simply put: if we
don’t increase our empathy now, we won’t get to experience those nifty
transhuman visions. Humanity may not be around at all to have them.
Central to my doubts is the growth of “personal media.” The
transformative power of a single novel was possible because of a lack of media
choices in previous centuries. When Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, an
entire nation read it because the media pickings were far slimmer and it was a
catchy, thought provoking, controversial read that many people thought was
integral to their participation as educated citizens. What is the motivation to read a work like this now, when we have
television’s mega-channel universe, iPods, the Internet, gaming, movies and an Amazonian
selection of printed material to choose from, most of which do not challenge
our beliefs of what our, or any other society, is really like?
Futurist Paul Saffo is also concerned by the growth of “personal media”
and their ability to destroy empathy.
Individuals can select from
a vast cyber-sea of media and utterly saturate their information space
exclusively with information sources that reinforce existing world views. Each
of us can create our own personal media walled garden that surrounds us with
comforting, confirming information, and utterly shuts out anything that
conflicts with our world view.
This is social dynamite, for
shared knowledge and information is the glue that holds civil society together.
It is the stuff that caused people to change their opinions and to empathize
with others. (Saffo 2005)
He notes a study by Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, whose research has
found that there is almost no overlap between the blogs read by liberals and
conservatives. Even more frightening, this personal media trend has spread to fiction
as well. This is documented by both Juan Enriquez (Saffo 2005) and Vladis Krebs
separately, who have found that there is a similar divide in what liberals and
conservatives read in both fiction and non-fiction (The Left Behind Series
by conservatives vs. The Da Vinci Code
by liberals, for instance) (Krebs 2003).
Young people in this first decade of the 21st Century have
only known a world dominated by personal media. They already use multi-media
technology extensively for connection, living on My Space or the Facebook,
IMing and texting, and by and large, they don’t encounter “the other.” They
usually encounter more of themselves, looking for people with similar points of
view and taste: “OMG, does anybody else out there think will.i.am is HOT?” Worse,
many use it as a venue to commodify their narcissism with self-advertisements.
Each screen asks the viewer to not only “Look at me. Want me. Love me,” but to,
“Buy me,” by making them an official “Friend.” Emotional prostitution does not
increase empathy. If anything, it increases their reliance on their peer group
values and not on alternative values that might challenge their belief systems
and open them up to a world they have yet to experience. The more they connect,
the less they learn and their blogs and chatrooms demonstrate an increased
narcissism beyond the normally high level associated with their age group in
their search for individuation. They search for validation in self-reflection,
and, in the hall of mirrors that can be the Internet, only their mirrored peers
reflect back at them.
As this behavior is habitualized and institutionalized, the narcissism
will grow, because, unless one is secure with one’s self and situation to
be forced into discomfort, forced into a strange new world where one must
make peace with differences and learn to empathize with “the other,” why
would anyone? This is why we need storytelling. You don’t need to come into
physical or electronic contact outside your ideological comfort zone. The book,
stage or screen keeps the characters at a distance, allowing the
reader/audience/viewer to relax into the experience and open their mind. No
real person is waiting on the other side of the digital connection to flame
them, cyber-stalk them or humiliate them. With storytelling, we can
experience the thrill of “the other,” yet remain safe.
Video games are another popular multimedia technology that has not
reached its full maturity as either a technology or an art form. Long thought
of as simply shoot ’em ups or virtual construction sets, video games can be far
more than that.
Until recently, most video games did not create empathy, because while
a very basic “storytelling” is involved, the depth of roleplaying is so
shallow, it doesn’t create deep psychological involvement in characterization.
You might be playing Duke Nukem, but you aren’t concerned with the King of
Carnage’s inner state or his effect on others or what might happen to him
(beyond his kicking ass and taking names) because his only purpose is his
individual survival. When a role’s entire raison
d’être is reduced to hit or be hit, kill or be killed, gain the
goodies/points/status or lose the goodies/points/status, the game is capable of
decreasing empathy and can even be used as a desensitization device, as is the
online recruitment engine America’s Army,
created by the US Military, or actual training video games, designed to hone
real soldier’s reflexes and survival skills.
Simplistic, violent video games can even be
considered “anti-empathy” technology.
Nicholas L. Carnagey, Brad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson (2006) have
done several studies on the effects of violent video games on empathy. In a
particularly fascinating experiment, they divided participants into two groups:
those who had just played a violent video game and those who played a
non-violent video game. Each player was isolated in a game room. After they
finished the game, the player was exposed to a recorded “drama” outside their
closed door, where two actors (one playing an aggressor and one playing a
victim) had recorded a violent interaction on CD. At the end of the drama
(which was designed to convince the game player that a real victim was really
getting hurt), the victim cried for help. Those who played the violent video
games were more reluctant to help the violence victim, taking an average of
65.6 seconds before they would get up and see if they could help, as opposed to
an average of 16.2 seconds by the players of the non-violent games (Carnagey
et. al. 2006). Video game companies love to cry foul over researchers’
accusations of negative effects of violent video games, but then they turn
around and use its potential dangers as advertising: “’Psychologists say inside
every 18- to 35-year-old male, there lies a potential psychotic killer,’ states
an ad for the Philips games Nihilist
and Battle Slayer. ‘Can he come out to play?’” (Davis 2004).
But video games are coming of age. “Serious games” is a term used to
describe a new genre of interactive games that deals with real world problems in
all their complexity. Games like PeaceMaker,
where players must assume the role of either the Israeli Prime Minister or the
Palestinian President; or Darfur is Dying,
where players must escape the Janjaweed while finding supplies to save
themselves and their village place players in compelling, difficult situations
where their choices and outcomes can greatly affect how the player ultimately
feels about the real world conflict and its participants. When one of
Peacemaker’s creators, Asi Burak, had real Israelis and Palestinians switch
roles and play the game, “they developed a more nuanced sense of why the other
side acted as it did. In Qatar, several people told him that ‘they kind of
understood more the pressures the Israeli Prime Minister has’” (Thompson 2006).
The very act of presenting complex questions and real-life issues within a game
has raised video gaming from entertainment to art, with a positive effect on
empathy.
But do these games have a permanent effect on
empathy? It’s too early to say, since serious gaming is too recent a
development, with no experimental data to show for it. But they already inspire
“an unusual kind of debate: an argument about how rule changes can affect
society” (Thompson 2006). This is precisely the kind of debate the transhuman
future will depend upon, as the rules we have lived by for centuries change all
around us.
Other information technologies have provided a glimpse into the
possibilities of online empathy with the proliferation of successful Internet
sites that encourage global understanding. Russell Rukin, a professional artist
and developer of H+ websites believes,
Some blogs are Life
Theater and some bloggers consciously or unconsciously have a sense of
structure that mirrors the novel in the way they pick and choose which elements
of their lives they reveal. Many blogs are rapidly updated newscasts giving
first hand information wells in areas such as chaotically evolving war zones,
in which the only other information feed preys on the citizens and denies them
a voice… [Perhaps] our brains were not wired to be connected to the Net, to
bridge temporal and spatial barriers, to empathize with others around the world
via these blogs and e-mails, but they do empathize this way. (Rukin 2006)
If our Homo sapiens brain was
designed to be touched only by our tribe and not by Dickens’ orphans, then it
was not meant to be touched by the American G.I. stuck in Iraq, admitting on
his blog that he doesn’t know why he’s there or why his country is forcing him
and his fellow soldiers to hurt the Iraqi people – or be hurt by them. Nor was
it designed to connect to the Iraqi who writes that he’s seen his country go
from bad to worse, lost loved ones, feels utter hopelessness for the future and
in his rage, only wants to act out violently. Both just want to be united in a
safe place with those they love. And we relate to them as our mirror neurons
fire and burn a highway of empathy along our cortex for them and others like
them. However, we must always be aware that the emotional response we get from
our empathy is from our own evolutionarily (both culturally and genetically)
derived values. We could just as easily evolve beyond these values, if we
haven’t already. That could make them untrue in the new scenarios of the future
and invalidate empathy (Allbright 2006).
Virtual reality, which has been used for desensitization, both for
phobias in a clinical setting and for violence when used by the military, is
now used to create empathetic scenarios by reproducing the differing perceptions
of other people, due to illness and physical or psychological trauma, through
storytelling. In 1992, former psychotherapist and artist Rita Addison had an
accident which left her brain damaged, neurologically and visually impaired,
and unable to work. Medical professionals wrote her, and many others like her,
off as untreatable because they could not understand what was going on inside
their patient’s skulls and with no quantifiable indication of trauma,
considered their therapies completed. In 1994, teamed with MIT’s David Zeltzer
and University of Illinois/Chicago’s Marcus Thiebaux, she created her VR CAVE
installation, Detour: Brain
Deconstruction Ahead as a response to the failure of the medical community
to understand brain trauma patients. It allowed viewers to experience the
autobiographical “story” of her accident and see its effects on her
perceptually distorted world. With her
story contained within her work of art, she was finally able to reach those
professionals who before were unable or unwilling to understand her disability
because they considered her a “layperson” and therefore unable to accurately
quantify her own experience (Addison 1995).
VR illness simulators now help both professional and lay caregivers
understand just how it feels to suffer from heart disease (AstraZeneca’s Heart
FX Pod), macular degeneration (Virtual Reality in Medicine Lab, University of
Illinois/Chicago) and stroke (Addison and Umea University). These programs
appear to have increased the quality of care given by creating empathy in
caregivers for their patients’ experiences (Aldous 2006).
Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo and his team at the University of Southern
California are taking virtual therapy to the next level, to create virtual
reality programs to help the sufferers of many types of psychiatric disorders
gain better control of their bodies and minds, including Iraq war veterans
overcoming Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
(Rizzo 2006 [1]). Now he wants to help create empathy in the family and
friends of these soldiers before they
return from combat, because as families welcome home their traumatized loved
ones, they will immediately have to deal with the laundry list of social and
behavioral difficulties these vets face. He plans to do this by integrating virtual
reality with an Automated Story Generation (ASG) system and an Intelligent
Tutoring System (ITS), two artificial intelligence systems his team have
created that will generate realistic stories of challenging real-life
scenarios, using acquired story elements from previous veterans’ families as
input. It will be through these story elements collected from the past that he
will be able to construct an interactive, virtual environment that will put the
new families in the shoes of their returning loved ones, to be better able to
help them through the disorienting return to non-combative life and minimize
the overall trauma to their families (Rizzo 2006 [2]).
The work of Burak, Addison, Rizzo and others like them is an exciting
glimpse into the future of storytelling and technology working together to
create empathy. But even if story-driven VR, gaming, etc. becomes the norm, how
do we increase empathy in an increasingly segmented society? And what is the
effect on empathy if our technological access is implemented unevenly, because
of philosophical, social or economic impediments?
If, as Paul Saffo (2005) thinks, the phenomenon of personal media means
that we no longer read and share stories as a culture and as Jane Smiley (2005)
worries, “the novel has died for us,” will we have empathy for those we are not
connected to by our Wi-Fi? Can we feel as much for the hi-tech have-nots if we
don’t hear their stories? I believe we cannot. For example, American opinion
about the war in Iraq changed dramatically once U.S. citizens started hearing
the soldiers’ and civilians’ blogged stories, on both sides of the conflict,
and realized that the US government sanctioned media stories which they had
been told previously were, at best, misleading and, at worst, false – namely,
that US soldiers were, to a person, in support of their efforts and the Iraqis
were nothing but thrilled to be released from Saddam’s totalitarian iron grip,
no matter what the cost. Now, of course, we know otherwise, but more
importantly, we feel for them – all because of their stories. But if we hadn’t
read the blogs or unsanctioned interviews, and we still lived in our previous
state of ignorance, our opinions would not have changed so dramatically, if at
all.
Similarly, if the cognitive, emotional and longevity enhancements that
transhumanists wish for come to pass, but there are enhancement haves and
have-nots divided by bio-technological evolution, is it possible for the
unenhanced and the enhanced to understand each other? And will our attraction
to personal media discourage us to seek out those life stories that differ so
much from our own, so that we might even doubt we share humanity in common? Is
empathy possible then?
Much has been surmised in H+ writings about the difficulties that may
arise between the Enhanced and the Naturals. Since access to technology will
never replace the role of storytelling to create empathy to bridge the
Natural/Enhanced gap, technology’s content must possess the same
seductive-yet-safe qualities of the novel to engage “the other” if we have any
hope of gaining perspectives to understand one another. Otherwise, if we can’t
communicate effectively with each other as we exist in differing states of
humanity, with different agendas and aspirations, at best, we will be forced to
experience the patronizing toleration of the Enhanced, no longer able to
appreciate what being “just human” is like on one hand, and the fear,
frustration and jealousy of the Naturals, regardless of whether they desire
enhancement or not, on the other. At worst, we are co-evolving enemies and we
know enough about evolution to know what that means. We must do everything in
our power to prevent the worst case scenario.
Therefore, the only hope is for all of us to tell stories. Lots and
lots of stories. Both our own stories and the stories of others. Both true and
fictional stories. But most importantly, like the best storytellers, we must
make these stories universal in their appeal. And make them from our heart.
Then we must spread these stories as pervasively as possible in the
multicultural sphere, using as many forms of media as possible, in the hopes of
catching those who don’t share the same views unawares, so when they read or
see or VR that story, they might say to themselves, “You and I may not be
alike, but now I understand you. And I
think you’d understand me, too, if I told you my story.”
So what’s the killer app for empathy technology that we can use here
and now and not in some H+ future, to help tell these stories and get us to the
tomorrow we hope we have? If gaming and virtual reality are the emerging art
forms of the 21st Century, could a combination of empathy-building
games like Peacemaker and Rizzo’s
VR/AI story generation systems be the first steps in creating an empathy-generating
story engine that could be played as a game? Could one be created that didn’t
focus on one story in particular, but in stories and conflicts in general, one
that could deconstruct and reconstruct the universal aspects of story structure
to create multiple, if not infinite experiences of ‘the other’ that humanity
needs in order to survive and thrive? Maybe by inputting your personal
background and traits, the program creates a compelling hero and story as
unlike you as possible. Or maybe it’s a
multi-player online game with procedural generation, like Will Wright’s
upcoming game, Spore, but in this
game, you either create a “you” as unlike you as possible or create a “you”
that is like you, but you are forced to trade avatars with other players, playing
the unfamiliar “life” within the story, so you inhabit the shoes of “the
other.”
Regardless of how it’s accomplished, its most important quality is that
it must be entertaining enough to create the seductive-yet-safe qualities for
players to want to both engage and lose themselves in the story. What I have in
mind is a sophisticated, nuanced game aimed squarely at the collective
unconscious of potential players everywhere, helping them understand the point
of view of people as unlike themselves as possible. In this way, empathy and
technology don’t have to become opposing concepts.
Big ideas, I know. But you have to start somewhere.
During the 2006 Academy Awards broadcast, Paul Haggis, the
writer/producer/director of Crash (a
movie about the need for social empathy in 21st Century Los Angeles)
quoted Bertolt Brecht to remind us that, “Art is not a mirror held up to
reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Brecht’s quote has become my
rallying cry regarding all things H+, because the challenge to transhumanity
will be how to use Brecht’s hammer to shape transhuman ideas and the technology
behind those ideas, never forgetting that the world is a very large and diverse
place and H+ ideas on the surface may contradict another culture’s deeply held
values as they struggle to communicate. By using art in its many guises, but
most importantly in the guise of storytelling, I can only hope that Brecht’s
hammer will be as effective in the future for creating empathy, guiding
humanity into a positive trans- and even posthuman era.
References
Addison, R. 1995. Detour: Brain Deconstruction
Ahead. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications,15(2): 14-17.
Aldous, P. 2006. Illness simulators boost medical empathy. New Scientist, 2546.
Allbright, J. 2006. Personal Communication.
Carnagey N.L., B.J. Bushman and C.A. Anderson. 2006. The effect of
video game violence on physiological desensitization to real-life
violence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction
in children with autism spectrum disorders. Published online: |
doi:10.1038/nn1611, pp1660 – 1662.
Davis, E. 1998 & 2004. TechGnosis. New York: Harmony Books.
Iacoboni M, Molnar-Szakacs I, Gallese V, Buccino G, Mazziotta JC, Rizzolatti G. 2005. Predicting the Future: Mirror Neurons Reflect the Intentions of Others. PLoS Biol. Mar;3(3):1.
Krebs, V., 2003. http://www.orgnet.com/leftright.html
Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity is Near. New York:
Viking.
Lada. A. and N. Glance, “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S.
Election: Divided They Blog.” Available: http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/adamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf
Langford, D.J., S.E. Crager,
Z. Shehzad, S.B. Smith, S.G. Sotocinal, J.S. Levenstadt, M.L. Chanda, D. J.
Levitin, and J.S. Mogil. 2006. Social
Modulation of Pain as Evidence for Empathy in Mice Science 30
June; 312: 1967-1970.
Márquez, G.G. 1988. Love
in the Time of Cholera. New York: Knopf.
Rizzo, A.A., B.O. Rothbaum and K. Grapp. 2006 [1]. Virtual Reality Applications for Combat-Related
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Combat and
Operational Stress Management: Theory, Research and Practice.
Rizzo, A., 2006 [2]. Personal Communication.
Rukin, R. 2006. Personal Communication
Saffo, P. 2005. Farewell Information, It’s the Media Age, Available, http://www.saffo.com/essays/essay_farewellinfo.pdf
Smiley, J. 2005. Thirteen
Ways of Looking at the Novel. New York: Random House.
Thompson, C. 2006. Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time, The New York Times, July 23.
Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, second edition.
1979. 594. “empathy”
Woodard, J. 2002. Storytelling:
Past – Present – Future. Available: http://www.storyteller.net/articles/7