ecologist carl safina
Empathy in the Age of AI
If you think your dog loves you, you're a fool. If you feel a kinship with a tree, you're a hippie. And if you over-empathize with a wild animal, you must be wearing cheetah prints and a flower crown, because you are Carole Baskin. The imperative to be on guard against anthropomorphism infuses almost every aspect of modern life. Yet many people would struggle to articulate why, exactly, attributing human qualities to nonhuman entities--from gorillas to large language models--is so woefully naive.