Social Mind Upload: Unleashing our Empathy

Speaker 1

Hi. So I’m talking today about a certain technology, something that we usually stereotypically think of as technology. And we’re talking about social media. Great, thank you.

Michaelann Gardner

But I want to start off by telling you a story that’s very blurry. Brian, do you know is that going to be normal the whole way through? Okay. You guys might get some really blurry pictures. I have a lot of pictures. We’ll run with it.

Michaelann Gardner

So this picture you can’t see very well is a young black boy in New York. How many here are familiar with the blog or the Facebook page Humans of New York? Okay, a few of you.

Michaelann Gardner

Okay, so for those of you who either don’t know what it is or weren’t following this particular story, this is a man named Vidal. Humans of New York basically has a premise of going around and asking random people on the street, what’s your deepest fear? What is the thing you regret the most? And it gets these incredibly moving answers. The photographer of this project ran into this little kid named Vidal, and Vidal said he asked him who influenced him the most. And Vidal said, my principal, Mrs. Lopez, when we get in trouble, she doesn’t suspend us. She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time, she made every student stand up one at a time and she told each one of us that we matter.

Michaelann Gardner

Now the photographer thought this was incredible and so he decided to track down Mrs. Lopez and he interviewed her and got her quotes all over the all over the blog. And then he talked to one of her co-teachers and he talked to other kids in the street who told this story about how it was to live in this particular part of New York and how the housing projects were dirty and people would pee in the hallway and how so many students would fail. But misses Lopez believed in all of them and she put their trust in them and she held them to high expectations. That being said, we’re going to come back to that story in a minute.

Michaelann Gardner

The interesting thing about transhumanism is that we’re all really aware of some of the potential downfalls of transhumanism, right? Some of the potential downfalls of the of the of the transhuman, of people becoming transhumans. One would be that we might experience we might try to perfect the human race at the expense of the of the individual, a kind of eugenics, right? This is a poster from the original eugenics movement.

Michaelann Gardner

We also Fear, they might actually become robots. They might start to lack heart. So it says, Mr. Robot, what do you think? Do you care? Do you love? Or are you just empty inside? Right?

Michaelann Gardner

We’re also afraid that some technology will only be available to the especially rich. It will deepen inequality. that it will make those who are in power more powerful and those who are disempowered less powerful.

Michaelann Gardner

These are real fears. We can definitely see them already happening in certain parts of the world. These are things that already exist and that technology would definitely exacerbate. There’s a lot of things we can do to prevent this, right? Laws, policies, a myriad of things.

Michaelann Gardner

But my premise today is that there’s a very particular technology that can actually help Alleviate it? Who’s clicking? I don’t know. You’re improving your slides, sorry. Okay, great. Thanks. I’ll keep talking. It’s a very particular technology that can actually help us overcome these three particular fears if we just know how to use it right. And that technology, can I click? Okay. That technology is social media. And let me tell you why I think this is the case.

Michaelann Gardner

So, but first I want to talk to you a little bit about This guy. This is a guy named Robert Dunbar. I think social media, what’s interesting about it, is that it’s a kind of mind upload, right? So we imbue social media with our personalities, with our interests. It actually expands our memory capacity because we have photographs we can go back and look at if we’re using Facebook or life events. And so it becomes like a kind of form of mind upload, but it’s also a social upload.

Michaelann Gardner

So this guy, Robert Dunbar, he is the guy who posited Dunbar’s number, which is the 150 number. probably most of you have heard of it. It’s the idea that we can only truly connect to about 150 people in our group. So he figured this out by looking at primates. These are primates looking like it’s not primates, but they’re monkeys grooming a capybara. And they looked at social groups of monkeys and looked at their brain size and was able to create a model whereupon he could predict about how many social connections a given primate could have given on its brain size and its another monkey’s group size. So you plug the human brain into the same model, you get the number 150. That most of us can only connect to about 150 people on a meaningful basis. However, sorry, we’ll come back to that. Don’t look at that one yet.

Michaelann Gardner

However, I think that it’s actually interesting because social media actually expands that 150 number, right? So rather than simply being able to connect with people at work and our family, we have a greater ability to check in on people, to have details of their lives. We don’t have to know everything suddenly about that friend from eighth grade. If you want to follow up with them, check their Facebook, and it’s all there for us without having to actually be contained in our personal mind. Now, that being said,

Michaelann Gardner

What does it have to do with transhumanous fears, right? So here’s the slide. I think it has to do with empathy. It has to do with increasing your empathy. And it has to do with a couple of specific things that increase your empathy that social media mirrors really, really well.

Michaelann Gardner

So one of the first ways that scientists know that our empathy is increased is by reading novels. So whenever the advent of Dickens and his fellow writers, there was an upsurge in empathy and in social justice movements. The New York Times has posted a study about how people who read literary fiction perform better on tests measuring empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence. They theorize this is the way it is, is because reading lengthy explorations of people’s lives helps you put yourself in someone else’s position. It helps you kind of experience what they experience. And it’s because there’s also multiple characters in a story, you also get a kind of a social experience. So you can kind of. experience what it might be like to be the villain, and then it might be be like be like to be the hero, and you kind of switch roles and get the whole social experience.

Michaelann Gardner

The next thing that scientists know increases empathy is activating your vagus nerve. So that’s a nerve. It’s very reptilian, you could say. It goes back far back in my evolution. People who see images of suffering, it activates their vagus nerve and they start feeling more compassion. So just by you seeing this picture of this woman clearly suffering, you’re feeling just a little bit more compassion compassionate and empathetic.

Michaelann Gardner

The last way that you can have your empathy increased is to live in an economically diverse area So wealthy people who live in a undiverse area, a very homogeneous area, they are less generous than people who live in diverse areas. An example of this is that people who make more than $200,000 a year, when they account for more than 40%. of the taxpayers in that zip code, they give an average of 2. 8% of their income to charity. But for those who earn less, they give an average of 4. 2%. It helps you connect more to people and understand their situation better.

Michaelann Gardner

That being said, I would theorize that all three of these ways are things that social media equips us especially to do really, really, really well. Let’s talk for a second about this one, for example.

Michaelann Gardner

I used to think it would be cool to read other people’s minds. Then I joined Facebook and got over that, right? This is like a much maligned way of using social media, kind of the over-sharing, right? We all think Why are these oversharers so obnoxious? Another much maligned thing is the stalking. If you knew how many times I check your Facebook page, you’d probably file a restraining order. And that’s probably true of me, for everyone in this room that I’m Facebook friends with, just FYI. But these are both really maligned, right? Like oversharing, stalking, like, those are the two things that people say are ridiculous about social media.

Michaelann Gardner

However, what’s interesting is that when we stalk someone, we’re experiencing their story, right? We’re experiencing characters. I love blogs for this reason. There are blogs I’ve been following for seven years now. And one of them, for example, the other day, she posted about her daughter who just turned three. And I was like, oh my gosh, I remember before that daughter was born. I’ve become engaged in this woman’s story. I know the characters. I know her struggles because she shares them very publicly.

Michaelann Gardner

Similarly, when people overshare, even just about stupid things, right? Like there was traffic and I was late to work and it was awful. Our vaginous nerve is stimulated just a little bit and we have a small experience of what it’s like to be them.

Michaelann Gardner

Lastly, of course, we all hate that one person on our Facebook or our Twitter or whatever who has. political opinions that we don’t like, right? Whether it’s your Uncle Fred or your friend from ninth grade that you just can’t seem to unfriend, right? They’re always obnoxious. But it actually introduces you to a sense of diversity and to an experience of the other that will actually help you increase. your empathy. So you may not live in an economically or politically diverse area, but those connections help you experience more diversity.

Michaelann Gardner

So okay. In other words, they bring the stories to you. They are the ones who are there helping you experience another person’s life. Now this all sounds good. I can’t necessarily say that I have a lot of like scientific evidence to back this one up.

Michaelann Gardner

But what I think is very, very interesting is this recent surge of something called crowdfunding. Now what crowdfunding is, is it started basically as a way, like you say, I want to make a music album. Everybody give me five bucks and I’ll make this music album. It’s morphed, however, into also being able to be used for charitable purposes. If you’re on Facebook, you’ll have seen that a lot of times you’ll get invitations to My great aunt Sally is dying of cancer, and she was impoverished as a child, so please help give ten bucks to support her through this difficult time, right? That’s a form of crowdfunding. It’s a form of coming together to help support someone.

Michaelann Gardner

So we start with that story of Udal, right? The kid in New York in the difficult situation who, you know Terrible stories were told about the situation they were in, how difficult it was, how difficult it was to escape that situation. The community of humans of New York is really remarkable because they started to see this and they started to see that there is a real need here that these kids have something a little bit more than what they had. So they started a fundraiser, and they raised $1. 4 million for these kids.

Michaelann Gardner

And if you average out the number of givers It does come out to very much per person, and it’s definitely not very much per number of viewers on this Facebook page. This money was used to set up a summer scholarship thing for some of the kids. Fund some field trips to Harvard, things like that. What’s also very interesting is that a result of the story going viral, Vidal is actually able to meet President Obama. And they had a little short chat and talked about the future and how important it is to prepare for the future.

Michaelann Gardner

What I find remarkable about this story is that if this isn’t A breaking down of some of those fears we talked about. I don’t know what is. So I mentioned at the beginning that we have these three fears as transhumanists, right, that we’ll seek to perfect the human race at the expense of the individual. That our technology will disconnect us from the best of what it means to be human. that some technology will only be available to people who are especially rich or especially well connected.

Michaelann Gardner

I think as we increase our empathy I think that we start to see the other as more of a person. And we start to realize the value of that one child, that one Vidal, that one Mrs. Lopez, and our need to maybe perfect the whole group and say, you know what, that person doesn’t really matter, I think is lessened.

Michaelann Gardner

I think social media as a technology connects us to the best of what it is to be human. There’s obviously the obnoxious part and sometimes even the malicious part. But with this story, we have seen how total strangers came together and they were able to really Do some concrete good for people that they didn’t even know.

Michaelann Gardner

I think similarly, as we take more advantage of things like crowdfunding It puts us in touch with those stories that we maybe may not hear of otherwise. And it helps us start to alleviate some of those social inequalities.

Michaelann Gardner

So as as the technologies are created, have the potential to increase the powerful and decrease the impotent or the unpowerful, if we can start right now to help help close some of that gap, that gap will be a lot less difficult to close as technology accelerates. CraftFunding is also an excellent way to get technology into the hands of the disempowered.

Michaelann Gardner

So In other words, I think empathy is really the key to overcoming each of those three fears. I think that connection is key to overcoming each of those three fears. And I think social media is actually the perfect way to do it. Because it is that mind upload, right? Suddenly our capacity to know others is dramatically expanded. We’ve gone beyond just the 150 that Dunbar posited is possible for us to know, and suddenly we can know, maybe not at an intimate level, but we can have a glimpse and an understanding of who they are of a thousand people. And that’s really, really transformative.

Michaelann Gardner

And I think what I would just leave you with, the last thing, is just to take advantage of this power. A lot of people malign social media, right, for all the reasons we talked about. But it can be really, really powerful if you’re willing to even share of yourself. Especially for those of you who may have interesting or different ideas, you are doing the people on your networks a favor. And when you take the opportunity, when you see stories like Vidal’s, to donate and to give and to generously invest in these networks, you are creating the kind of world that we want to have, and you’re helping technology to you’re kind of turning the ship of technology. You’re turning it in the direction that it needs to go to really be a powerful tool for good. Thank you very much.