Unlimited Expansion of Empathy

Technology can make us better human beings

Editorial note (2026): ‘Meerkat’ was the livestreaming app of 2015, briefly everywhere and shuttered the following year; a ‘Meerkat for the Mind’ meant that same casual, instant broadcasting, applied to one’s inner life.

David Orban once told me that if he could possess a superpower, it would be ‘an unlimited sense of empathy, controllable at will’.

I find it hard to imagine any power more valuable, more empowering, and yet more humbling.

How fascinating, then, to realise that technologies such as neural mapping, shared memories, and artificial emotional stimulation could provide us with exactly that superpower in the coming decades. This is the natural co-evolution of society and braintech: a ‘Meerkat for the Mind’.

We will share mindspace with thoughts born from a blending of multiple branches of cognition, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We can also allow others to truly understand our emotions from within, if we dare to let down our walls, if we sidestep the alexithymic tendencies we dress up as adulthood.

What will it be like to possess unlimited empathy?

We have enough empathy for ourselves that we no longer fear looking into the sarcophagus deep within, where lies the pain we dare not face. Through making peace with the darkness that dwells within, we no longer fear what may happen if others glimpse it. We stop fearing other people. We understand ourselves and our journey in life, and through radical acceptance of that journey, we accept that of others also.

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy.

— Spider Robinson

How will it feel to behold oneself through the adoring eyes of a lover? To enjoy the communion of lovemaking from the perspective of the other party as well as one’s own. To feel the success of another as pleasure instead of envy, compersion in lieu of jealousy.

Will we still seek supremacy over others when we also feel their pain and misery? What incentive remains when we can no longer escape the consequences of our unfair actions? Unlimited empathy may be a path to perfect karmic balance between what one sends out into the world and what one receives.

Empathy operates in the cognitive sense as well as the affective. Affective empathy can lead to negative consequences if reserved for an in-group and not universalised. Both ways of modelling the experiences of others are essential for a healthy individual. Harnessed together they provide objective analysis alongside the tools to respond in a socially conducive manner: sharp insights, soft delivery.

All moral development beyond the merely contractual requires empathy. Having the right ruleset is not quite enough. The execution of the Golden Rule requires imagining oneself in the position of another. Universalist morality is not achievable without first mastering this capacity. The technological positivists of the coming years will choose to augment their empathy so they can achieve power over themselves (mindfulness) and a consistent application of a more evolved spiritual morality.

This raises harder questions. Is it just to force others to feel the emotions of those upon whom they have an influence? How can we best police wilful sociopaths who refuse empathic augmentations, or who simply cannot afford them? Must they be consigned to quarantine within an empathic society? What of someone who rightfully points out an uncomfortable truth that also causes distress and dissonance in others?

Even irrational minds respond to behavioural incentives. By seeding a technologically driven expansion of empathy, we have an opportunity to turn this world into a place of consideration and kindness within a generation.

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