Artificial empathy, digital dependency, and loneliness: exploring connections and actions

Empathy is an essential ingredient to maintaining health in our primary relationships. At work, this relationship would most likely be with our immediate supervisors and direct reports. Beyond what the experts and headlines say, we all know how powerful it is to feel understood and cared for when we are hurt. In a world awash with instant gratification providing unlimited pleasure, distractions, and illusions of connections, we feel lonely and ill-equipped to deal with the everyday stressors of life. We seem less and less able to connect and feel other people in real life. This article explores the sustainability of being human in an increasingly virtual and artificially oversaturated world. <img alt="We see six frogs in boiling pots, three of those frogs sharing the same pot, and three remaining frogs boiling in their own respective boiling pot, drawn in dystopian Tokyo with emphasized cold color palette during a rainy night." src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:538/1*9ZkL0ld_RD2rzct5151fwQ.jpeg" style="height:538px; width:538px" /> Toasty till it isn’t (photo credit Antonio Sadaric and Midjourney) <h2>Empathizing with all the other frogs in the boiling pot</h2> Empathy — a skill that requires feeling for and with, adapting to, and reading others — has emerged as a central quality of managers, especially middle managers at the front line of motivating a stressed and depressed workforce. To Forbes, it is the most <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tracybrower/2021/09/19/empathy-is-the-most-important-leadership-skill-according-to-research/?sh=640f15de3dc5" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">important leadership trait</a>. <blockquote> Much like the proverbial frogs in the pot, the intensity of the presence of machines and our willingness to give up more and more of ourselves to them is increasing incrementally. We may not fully know the effects until it is too late. </blockquote> Many are worried about the impact of gen AI on our intellectual abilities to research, think, and write, and caution us to prepare for the intellectual and cognitive atrophy that gen AI might cause — machines generate responses for us and interpret those responses. <a href="https://carinisabelknoop.medium.com/artificial-empathy-digital-dependency-and-the-loneliness-epidemic-exploring-connections-and-8aec1ce84fd">Read More</a>