Simone Weil once said that the most generous thing a person could do was to truly listen.
A fourteen-year study, involving more than two thousand people ranging in age from 14 to 94, showed a dramatic decline in the number of daily interactions involving speech. “Because spoken words usually occur in conversations with other people, the change may represent thousands of everyday interactions that are no longer taking place.”*
What might be the consequences of speaking fewer words, of hearing fewer words? During our long history humans have relied on speech – the nuanced, responsive, and flexible practice that tethers us to one another. Doesn’t the speech of others aid our search to know reality?
Will social media content-makers be our “voices”, our official mapmakers, gaining the ability to determine reality by controlling the narrative?
Will we need to argue with AI platforms whose contributions are biased by definition, bereft of either humor or irony, and often just plain wrong?
Are we relinquishing opportunities to develop our most generous selves?
*Source: Association for Psychological Science, Valeria Pfeifer and Matthias Mehr/UMKC
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