Humans Are Pretty Good People

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

From The Viscous Platypus comes this link to a study in empathy. Robots (using the term very loosely) are built to these specifications:

• Roll forward
• Have the body proportions of a 1-year-old
• Have a flag that says where they would like to go, asking for help

… and people help them. To date, no robots have been lost or damaged.

To me, this shows not only human empathy, but the incredible processing power available to the world by interfacing with that empathy. Think about the distributed processing we could perform but withhold because to use it puts us in jeopardy to use it. And we’re usually right. But somehow, by assuring us that we are not being endangered through our evolved social senses, that processing is tapped.

Perhaps the future is not the Modern ideal of total autonomy, but one of free giving through the robust and extremely high bandwidth interface we’ve slowly developed over the last four million years. It’s given us open-source software, it’s given us a method of donating meaningfully to political causes $20 at a time, and it’s given us the tremendous power of social networking on the Internet. Maybe that power can be tapped for future endeavors of humanity, as well.