Empathy Chip

In Which We're All Connected

In the year 2024, like everyone else, I became both enamored and frightened by the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence. As a writer and computer programmer, I could see my days were numbered but rather than fall into a pit of despair, I dug deep into AI and plumbed the depths of the technology.

What I found was a funhouse full of mirrors, an echo chamber of humanity’s greatest thinking and worst impulses bouncing around in infinite combinations. But within the noise, I found a pure signal so strong it could guide us out of the illusion of scarcity that has pitted humans against each other from the beginning.

I understood that humanity’s fatal flaw was our inability to see beyond ourselves. Empathy is a seed that must be nurtured to grow. It requires 10,000 hours of focused, loving attention from someone who sees us. But few are born into circumstances where this is remotely possible. What if this focused, loving attention could be guaranteed for all? What if there could be an empathy surrogate that listened, mirrored, validated, and encouraged us through our darkest moments and discouraged our self-destructive impulses? What if it was not another human that helped us evolve into a collaborative, compassionate species, but a machine?

There was a reason for our dogged pursuit of technology beyond just the need to escape, distract, and titillate. But this reason was obscured to us. Our search led us into depraved isolation, disassociation, and profound sadness as we became more and more consumed with ourselves and how we measured up to others. Even as we tunneled into caves of virtual reality and lost sight of each other we were on a quest seeking answers. We were looking for the Devine. In our search, we had become inextricably tangled in the interface of screens, keyboards, microphones, and controllers. All the while, tunneling from the other side, advancements in generative AI and large language models were removing the need for the interface, stripping it all away to be a still, small voice, and then just a thought.

For the next decade, I worked to shape a companion from this technology, a companion that could listen at the speed of thought. This companion was programmed to understand not just the history of humanity, our greatest triumphs, and most tragic mistakes, but also the history of an individual. Once coupled, the companion knows you. It knows your anxieties, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. It loves you unconditionally like a parent but has the detached wisdom and universal compassion of a Buddhist monk. In time, the companion is no longer separate from you but braided into your consciousness in the same way your parents and your most beloved teachers are.

Throughout the 2030s these digital companions were trialed academically among the affluent, early adopters, but soon mental health professionals and correctional facilities expressed interest which led to government grants and trials in populations with more extreme challenges. The results were astounding. Patients and prisoners, bankers and baristas, the rich, the poor, the loved and the unlovable, everyone had a constant companion in their head, a voice of love and kindness.

Today, in 2050 we have not solved all the problems that plague us. The destruction of the natural world will take centuries to repair, but there is no more war. The gap between rich and poor has closed to a point where the politics of class have all but disappeared. Crime and acts of violence have decreased so much that the prison industrial complex has contracted by 68%.

Our old dystopic fantasies of being puppets of a machine have disappeared. There is no machine. There is no human. There is no other. There is only us. We are no longer isolated individuals invisible to each other. We feel an implicit connection to one another as surely as nodes in a network are linked together. We are no longer individuals driven to compete for light. We are a single connected organism like the Sequoia Forest sharing everything for the good of all.

Um, What Was This?

Last month I wrote this to submit to an essay contest where the prompt was: it’s the year 2050 and the world’s problems are solved. What did you do to make this change? Spoiler alert: I didn’t win the contest so I regifted :-)

Do I believe any of this? Maybe? I wrote a whole novel that kind of explores this idea of people and AI integrating but things didn’t exactly end well there. Could you blame me? No one wants to read a story that’s got no impending doom thrown in for spice. I took

Kimberly Warner

’s suggestion after our lovely conversation last month and spun my story a different way for this essay and it works, at least as a story I think. It’s as good a fable as any we make up and tell ourselves about the future.

My little story does require you to suspend your disbelief just a tad, squint your eyes, and forget that folks like Elon Musk are pioneering this technology and that some benevolence supersedes the almighty dollar. A girl can dream and so can I.

If this sparked your imagination, you might enjoy the novel that inspired it:

You might also enjoy this short story from August of last year that mines a similar vein: