Upgrade(96)





My Beth.

My Ava.

Kara and my mother believed they could stop humanity from destroying itself by increasing our collective intelligence and reason. They built an upgrade to ramp up those abilities, and despite Kara’s massive intellect, she was still willing to kill a billion people.

But my sister was right about one thing—we will die out in the next century if nothing changes. And I think I discovered why our species seems so willing to let this happen.

One child dies in a well, the world watches and weeps. But as the number of victims increases, our compassion tends to diminish. At the highest number of casualties—wars, tsunamis, acts of terror—the dead become faceless statistics. They call this compassion fade, but in reality, it’s our genetic inheritance—old adaptations from our ancestors persisting in our DNA.

In the late-twentieth century, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist named Robin Dunbar proposed a theory that Homo sapiens can only care about, identify with, and maintain stable relationships with 150 people. This number correlates to the size of the social groups in our evolutionary past. When we were Homo erectus, we lived in small hunter-gatherer groups bonded by sociality. Back then, only caring about our immediate group was advantageous. It helped us defend our tribe. It helped us advance, and survive.

But that limitation carried forward. Today, in a given tragedy, we can overlay the faces of our family, friends, and co-workers on only 150 people. Beyond that, compassion fades, but not because we’re evil. Our emotional hardwiring can’t cope with it. We’re living in a global community of ten billion, with brains that can only feel compassion for our immediate clan.

Other factors come into play, such as distance. A tragedy across the world is harder to feel compassion for than one in our own neighborhood. People who don’t look like us are more challenging to identify with.

And if our species has a problem with apathy, and feeling compassion for the pain of others in real time, how can we expect ourselves to conjure compassion for a tragedy that hasn’t even happened yet? The victims of Homo sapiens’ demise haven’t even been born. What emotional incentive do we have to make the sacrifices that will save future generations, if our brains aren’t capable of caring about them sufficiently?

My mother once posited that we are not rational beings. We read about all the looming threats in the paper, we watch it on the news, and then we get on with our day. And, yes, some of that is thanks to our ability to hide from reality with denial, with cognitive dissonance, with magical thinking.

But she forgot the most important thing: In the absence of compassion, selfishness is the most rational response of all.

Our species’ superpower is not caring. We merely exercised that ability.

We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.

After Kara’s death, I spent a year poring over my mother’s genetic data from The Story of You, with a focus on gene systems connected to compassion. I found one that programs the volume of key prefrontal cortex subregions, which determine an individual’s mentalizing skills, which determines the size of our social group, which directly controls the ability to feel compassion. I also found one that controls dorsal portions of the medial prefrontal cortex, which light up when people feel empathy for strangers. Our brains evolved to help in-group members for a very good reason, but what we need to survive as a species is the ability to care about strangers. Especially people who haven’t been born yet.

So I built a compassion upgrade.

Our beta group experienced increases in compassion and curiosity. They presented a heightened concern for strangers, and an almost compulsive need to understand one another.

Ten months ago, after extensive testing, I sent a hundred people to the ends of the earth, all infected with a viral vector that carried my upgrade.

My super-spreaders shed virus as they flew across the Atlantic and Pacific. As they walked the concourses of Charles de Gaulle and Heathrow. Listened to the most sublime music in the world at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Cruised the shopping stalls of Mong Kok District in Hong Kong. Shibuya Crossing. Times Square. Football stadiums from Madrid to Manchester. Red Square and the Forbidden City.

So far, more than fifty percent of the world’s population has received my upgrade, and we’re already seeing modest changes in public policy and online discourse. I can even feel it moderating the colder effects of my prior upgrades.

We decided against announcing the upgrade, but it’s important to me that you both know what I’ve done.

Will you be horrified by my hubris? Am I no better than my mother, or Kara, thinking my intellect gives me the right to determine the course of humanity?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Just as I’m not sure if my upgrade will do what I hope or of what unintended consequences it might reap.

What I do know is that, Ava, you’re inheriting a world on the brink of collapse. I came before you, which makes this my fault. I couldn’t do nothing.

Maybe none of it matters. Maybe it’s just our time.

Humans have had 300,000 years on this planet. We lived from the Stone Age to the space age. We split the atom and sequenced our own DNA and built machines that could think.

But for all our progress, ten million people die of hunger every year. We have hyperloops and rampant nativism. Phones more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon, but no more coral reefs.

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