What the Pandemic has to Teach the AI Tech Sector About Empathy and Compassion
It is a week into a city-mandated stay-at-home order due to the COVID-19 virus. To do my part I have been socially distancing and have not seen anyone in person for two days. Per the Colorado Governor’s order I allow myself to leave the house for an hour to engage in the ‘essential activity’ of exercise. I run through the park next to my house. It is a gorgeous March day in Denver. There are groupings of people all across the park but almost everyone is sitting or standing at least 6 feet away from one another. Even friends walking together keep their distance. As I run I dip and dive around others trying to keep a 6ft radius in between myself and the strangers I pass.
I do not remember a time where I have ever felt so scared to be close to another human being during daytime in a park. I am hyper-vigilant as I run to be distant from others; to engage in the unnatural ritual of intentional separation from those around me. The ‘what if’ questions stir in my head: “what if I catch the virus from that man coughing on the bench? What if I am asymptomatic and give the virus to that elderly couple walking their corgi? What if I’m not giving enough space? What if I’m not taking enough space? What if my actions hurt others? What if the actions of others hurt me?”
It strikes me in this moment that we as a society have entered a period of enforced empathy. For the sake of survival we have had to quickly adapt to be more intentionally empathetic and compassionate.
In this time of pandemic we have been thrust into a survival mode on a massive scale, with all the bells and whistles of our trauma responses and fears. Most colleagues I have are losing sleep over anxiety. Friends are losing jobs. The self-care many of us engage in during our normal life to keep us steady has been cancelled or is no longer possible. Many of us know someone who is infected and some of us already know the death that this virus can cause first-hand.
This anxiety and fear of the virus has brought out the worst and the best of us. For every toilet paper hoarder there is a nurse working overtime with a makeshift respirator mask on the front lines caring for patients. For every beach party in Miami that is a petri dish for the virus to spread there are parents spending weeks away from their children to protect them. For every story of dangerous ignorance there is a story of unconditional compassion for the wellbeing of others. We have adapted suddenly to prioritize both our selfishness and our mutuality.
There is plenty being written about human selfishness right now. Instead, I want to take this time reflect on this latter phenomenon of empathy and compassion and what it might have to teach AI technology development and application.
The pandemic has put into clear focus a reality that is always true; we are all radically interconnected. Even before the virus each of our actions impacted others on a wide scale. Much like the classic example of the butterfly whose wing beat creates a hurricane on the other side of the world it has always been true that our actions intermingle with the actions of others and co-create the world. However, this pandemic has dragged us briskly into a state of communal survival where we can see this interconnectedness up close.
Right now as I write this I am blisteringly aware of how I wipe down the elevator buttons in my building to try to stop the spread of disease to my neighbors. I am intentional about who I pass in public not just for my own wellbeing but for the desire to protect others. At the grocery store I am being intentional to buy only what I need so that there will still be food for others. Much like many of us I am caught in this tricky dance between fear and hope and in the center of this dance sits the curious substance of empathy.
In its etymology the word ‘empathy’ literally means ‘to feel with.’ The word ‘compassion’ similarly means ‘to suffer with.’ The tragic circumstances of our world have pushed us into a state of survival that has given us an invitation towards a more intentional living-into of these ways to live. We have been pushed into a world in which empathy has become a crucial part of how we survive and live our day to day lives in a way that protects us all. If there is one positive of this devastating virus is that it has reminded us of our radical interconnection to one another.
As a tech and AI ethicist I often wonder what it would look like to operationalize ethics deeply into AI tech development and application. I have worked with individuals, companies, and researched at multiple levels to strategize around this very question: “how do we embed empathy and compassion in our technology?”
One of the biggest barriers I have found to embedding empathy in these systems is the painful truth that most of us generally do not care about ethics. We have largely been conditioned to think of ethics as an extra credit assignment or a nice bonus to the real work of getting the project complete on time and under budget. Ethical considerations have historically been seen as supplemental to the primary design and objective goals of technology development and research. Ethics has been regulated to the bougie ivory-tower of privilege and has been divorced from the ‘necessary work’ of production.
There is a current trend in the technology sector, especially in AI technology development, to center ethics more directly. Groups such as the FATE Group at Microsoft Research, AI Now, and others are engaging with companies at all levels to invite them to put ethics at the core of their product development. The industry seems to be coming around to the idea that ethics and values have always existed in the products we develop, they have just been unspoken and invisible. Now the question for industry is how to operationalize, embed, and make more intentional positive ethical values.
This pandemic, as terrible as it is on so many levels, is perhaps the ethical wakeup call that AI tech development spaces need. COVID-19 has reminded us in no uncertain terms that we are radically interconnected with one another. Each of our actions impacts others and changes the world we are co-creating with everyone else we share this planet with.
I wonder what would happen if AI tech development spaces took seriously this idea of radical interconnectedness. How would we design technology differently if we all agreed that empathy and compassion were not just necessary for creating effective machines but for sustaining the very survival of our world? If the technology sector engages fully with the reality revealed by this devastating virus, that we are by definition radically mutual creatures, how might that transform our products, our relationships with technology, and our relationships with one another?
Stay Radical!
-Dylan Doyle-Burke
