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Empathy
in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy
PJ Manney
pj@pj-manney.com
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 only exist
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 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 help but 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, Zora 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. 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 its 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 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 thinks, personal media means we no longer read and share stories
as a culture and as Jane Smiley 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? 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 importantly 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
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