08/11/14 13:52
Computers such as IBM's Watson already possess basic human-level common sense. Not only has it proven more adept than us at Jeopardy, it's starting to replace frontline phone support workers and even tele-marketers.
It's not hard to see that any job that requires only limited thinking will soon be taken by machines. This will happen sooner than we think.
At the same time as this, large numbers of people still live in abject poverty, and worse in places where daily conflict and destruction occur.
The fundamental issue is human value. What is the life of a specific individual worth to us as a whole? And more importantly, what can we do to dramatically raise that value?
This is not an ethical question. It's not what an individual life
should be worth. Even if we claim that human life is priceless, our behavior indicates that we don’t believe that.
However, if we can amplify the actual and perceived value of human life, then our behavior will adjust accordingly.
Outside of our family and close friends, what strangers do we value the most?
On a psychological level, these are people whose
personalities affect us the most. We call them celebrities. People we feel like we know though we don’t. Somehow we group these people in a similar circle as our friends.
A fundamental limit in our psychology is the number of people we can keep track of. This
Dunbar Number is somewhere between 100 to 250 people.
People outside of this circle are what we know as “strangers”.
Outside our small tribal circle is also the idea of “enemies”. Somehow, these are usually very loose concepts and labels such as “Communists", “Terrorists", or “Conservatives/Liberals”. Most of our enemies tend to be anonymous strangers.
This is not new, it is a part of our evolutionary psychology. Wars are not fought because every person in one tribe collectively has a vendetta against every person in another. It is because every person is first led to believe they should have a vendetta against the concept of another tribe, and then simply determine who the members of that tribe might be.
It's the ability to de-humanize others which allow us to perform the greatest harm on them.
It's not just about war though. De-humanizing others is also what
allows us to not care what happens to them.
Consider what you would do if somebody maliciously launches a rocket that destroys your co-worker’s house for political reasons, vs. what you do when this happens to someone you don't know anything about.
Adam Smith captured this idea magnificently in Moral Sentiments (1759).
So what can we do to counter this effect?
Related: Society.