Digital Empathy

With LLM’s ability to reason, do math, calculate, and write growing every day, one of the areas that is still underdeveloped is emotional recognition and digital empathy. I tried their avatars and was generally impressed by the experience. A machine’s ability to not only understand human emotions but also express them or mimic them in effective ways is still in progress.

The ability to express and recognize emotions is incredibly important, especially in activities that are not based merely on facts, like in psychology, coaching, or just in human-to-human interaction.

But we are slowly moving towards more developed digital empathy and expression of emotions by machines themselves. Part of this shift is happening with a change of interface. The evolution is looking like text-to-text, voice-to-voice, and finally, digital avatar to a person.

One of the services that offer AI consultants or AI assistants is Soul Machines, a company betting on this last approach: human-to-computer avatar. I was genuinely impressed by the experience. The speech recognition is fast, and the emotions that the AI avatar produces are mostly appropriate, though still a little clunky. Nonetheless, it’s incredibly impressive.

Yet, I’m still curious to see a digital agent that I feel truly connected with, emotionally. Weirdly enough, I think this moment has already passed with the invention of Tamagotchi, but that was still quite a limited interaction.

Gary Davis and the World Passport: How One Man Challenged National Boundaries and Championed World Government

Gary Davis was an extraordinary figure and one of the most important pioneers of post-nationalism in the 20th century. As a former Broadway actor and World War II pilot, Davis was profoundly impacted by the horrors of war, prompting him to renounce his American citizenship in 1948. He famously declared himself a “citizen of the world” and, in a bold move, interrupted a United Nations General Assembly session to advocate for world government and the idea of global citizenship.

Davis didn’t stop there. He created the “World Passport,” a speculative document for those who identify as global citizens. Surprisingly, despite its unconventional nature, this document has been accepted by some countries, allowing people to cross borders with it. Davis also played a pivotal role in founding the World Government of World Citizens, striving to transcend national boundaries, and built a coalition of cities to support this vision.

For those interested in his fascinating life and contributions to the post-national movement, I highly recommend the documentary The World Is My Country, which delves into his life’s mission and his ongoing influence on global citizenship movements. It’s one of the most exciting documentaries I’ve ever seen. #postnational