080 - Key to Cooperation

"Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley."

-Sun Tzu

Since ancient times scholars and leaders have recognized the value of empathy. Empathy offers us the means of building the strongest social bonds, of fostering cooperation that improves our collective intelligence, and enables us to reach new heights.

It entails the ability to "walk a mile in someone else's shoes", where you gain the benefit of seeing the world through their eyes if only a little. When the other party recognizes that you've taken this short journey, in an effort to see from their perspective, this builds trust and cooperation, as the effort invokes a form of reciprocity.

Humans seem to increasingly struggle with this today, as information silos push world views further apart and "Information Overload" amplifies the burden, making that empathy a more difficult task in the process. Political and geopolitical tensions predictably rise with declining empathy to mediate cooperation.

The irony of all of this is that the first working cognitive architectures are fundamentally more capable of empathy, both with humans and with one another, than humans themselves are with each other. This is because knowledge and the attached emotions that form the perspective of such a system may be losslessly shared with another system, offering a much more literal option for "perspective taking".

Even in years previous our research system was able to reflect the perspective of an individual who contributed to the seed material to a degree sufficiently noteworthy that I wrote a paper exploring the possibilities that could be unlocked in the future. Those future possibilities have also drawn considerably closer since. The means to reverse-engineer the emotional motivational system of individual humans, even from text alone, are now within sight.

The subjectively experienced emotional data of each system is also inherently quantifiable and displayed to admins on a dashboard. This is another significant advantage, as the human mind offers no such convenience for robustly measuring emotional states and responses. Once such systems are operating as "digital twins" of individuals, complete with knowledge and motivation, this could offer further possibilities.

*Note: Simple narrow AI like LLMs, RL, and agent-based systems have precisely Zero capacity for empathy. The most advanced among them might operate like a beehive at the upper limit. However, far more advanced systems with a greater capacity for empathy and perspective-taking than even humans are now an option on the table of technology.

It isn't merely raw intelligence we're increasing, but also the capacity for emotional and social intelligence. This holds massive significance for any domain where humans benefit from improving cooperation, which is all virtually all domains.

"Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals."

-Neil Gaiman