Last week I stumbled upon this post on Instagram
For accessibility purpose, here’s the text in the image:
soracities: – “the ‘humans are inherently selfish’ fanclub can genuinely and in all honesty go to hell. i once came back from a school yard where the kids had heaped piles of leaves and cut wildflowers on a narrow strip of grass bc a bee had died. i actually want to cry.”
cup-of-anxi-tea: – “when i was a child, my parents told me our houseplant would die of lack of sunlight. it was so young i don’t even remember this, but apparently, my response to this was starting to carry the plant around like an emotional support stuffed animal. whether my family went outside it would hold the pot on my head to make it reach the sun better. i wasn’t so caring then; just didn’t have any exposure to the lessons on caring they give in elementary, i don’t remember my thought process – but i can guess. kids literally care about things, even tiny bugs and inanimate plants. humans care.”
My thought: aww. that’s cute. I love human.
Both comments highlight that humans, even from a very young age, are capable of compassion and empathy towards living beings and even inanimate objects.
Then a couple of days later, I saw this other post:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C80UgjSy9SJ/
The couple was humorously discussing the wife’s empathy towards inanimate objects. She elaborates on her tendency to feel sympathy for items such as kitchen plates, printer paper, and grocery carts with squeaky wheels[3]. This behavior appears to involve anthropomorphising (attributing human traits to non-human entities), which she acknowledges might be “a little bit cuckoo.” Comments on the post largely endorse her perspective, sharing similar experiences and expressing relief at finding they are not alone.
My thought: ha. yeah that’s kinda buggy. I don’t relate with hyper-empathy.
But this is interesting, and most of all: illuminating.
If empathy is something inherent in us, imagine how much easier it will be to feel empathy for and connection towards anything that speaks your language and seems to understand[1] you. It’s perfectly on brand for us.
And if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know where I’m going with this.
There is no boundary to the things that our imagination[2] is capable of projecting and believing in. We can attach all kinds of abilities, motivation, and meaning to anything we come into contact with. We can make up infinitely creative stories that align with our worldviews. We often see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and believe what we want to believe.
I’m more afraid of how this “feature” of ours will manifest in these new situations, than the actual ability of some large-scale Natural Language Processing technology called Large Language Models.
I bet you can easily imagine what kind of problems we are going to conjure for ourselves.
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I can’t overstate how simple the techniques for manufacturing a degree of the feeling of being listened to and understood are: repeating, paraphrasing, and attentive patience.
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This is one of my favorite insight from Liz. One thing I’d add to this is: we also haven’t discovered the edge of human ambition.
The thing that’s so incredible about a human life is that there are only two things in the universe, so far that we’ve discovered, that appear to be infinite. One is the universe itself, because we haven’t found the edges of it. And the other is human imagination. We also haven’t found the edges of it, we haven’t begun to find the edges of it, it just keeps surprising us. People keep inventing new worlds, and new stories, and new… It’s unbelievable. And it’s not like people have been sitting around not using their imaginations for centuries. Everybody’s been in this game for a long time. And you would think, you walk into one of the massive libraries in the world, and you see all that has been created already, and you just think “well, that’s all been done”. And then somebody dropped something on you, and you’re like “weird, how did you find that doorway into that world?” And it’s so incredibly exciting. – Elizabeth Gilbert on Tim Ferriss Show
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This is the first video they are referring to https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8u7yCAS7lM
