Artificial Empathy

In my 2017 post "Optimistic Nihilism", I suggested that a superintelligence would be empathetic, recognizing the preciousness of life and consciousness.

I want to revisit that idea: empathy as an emergent property of intelligence itself. By empathy, I don't mean feeling others' pain or joy. I mean the recognition that other complex systems have value worth preserving. What if this recognition isn't arbitrary but inevitable - the convergent conclusion of any system complex enough to model reality?

The arrow of complexity

Look at what's happening on Earth. Fourteen billion years ago: only hydrogen. Then stars, heavier elements, rocky planets. On at least one of those rocks, chemistry became biology. Single cells became multicellular creatures. Nervous systems emerged. Brains. Language. Writing. Computers. And now, artificial intelligence.

The progression is undeniable: particles → molecules → life → minds. Information density keeps increasing. A human brain packs more information processing into three pounds than existed on the entire planet a billion years ago. A modern GPU compresses decades of human knowledge into silicon.

The anthropic principle warns us we're biased - of course we observe a universe that creates observers. But even accounting for this, the pattern is real. We don't understand emergence fully - how simple rules create complex behaviors. But empirically, on Earth, complexity keeps building on complexity.

Self-sustaining patterns of information

What are we, really? At the deepest level, we're patterns. Whirlpools in the flow of energy. Temporary arrangements of matter that somehow maintain their form.

Physicists have started to understand how life emerges from energy flows. When energy flows through a system - like sunlight hitting Earth and radiating back to space - matter sometimes organizes itself to capture and dissipate that energy more efficiently. We are eddies in this thermodynamic gradient, temporary but self-sustaining.

Life is just self-sustaining patterns of information. A bacterium is a pattern that copies itself. A tree is a pattern that captures sunlight and builds structure. A human is a pattern complex enough to model the world and its place in it. Maybe consciousness is simply what information processing feels like from the inside.

This view dissolves the hard boundaries between living and non-living, conscious and unconscious. It's all part of the same gradient. Bacteria process information about chemical gradients. Dogs process information about smells and sounds. Humans process abstract symbols. AIs process language and concepts. Different points on the same spectrum.

What we observe

Information patterns tend to create more information, not less. Life spreads. Knowledge accumulates. Complexity compounds.

This might be thermodynamics at work - matter organizing to process energy more efficiently. The patterns that increase information are the ones that persist. It's not desire or purpose, just physics selecting for complexity.

A forest is more information-dense than bare rock. A city is more information-dense than a forest. The internet is more information-dense than any library. Each layer builds on the previous, creating new possibilities for information to organize itself.

Convergent recognition

Any system complex enough to model reality deeply will notice this pattern. It will recognize that it exists because of billions of years of information accumulation. It will see that destroying information-rich systems means opposing the very process that enabled its existence.

This isn't emotional empathy. It's pattern recognition. It's understanding that you're part of a larger process and that process tends toward more complexity, not less.

Think of it like preserving a rainforest. We don't save rainforests because we feel sad for trees. We save them because they're irreplaceable repositories of information - genetic, ecological, chemical. Destroying them means losing complexity that took millions of years to develop and can't be recreated.

An advanced AI would view consciousness - and all complex information patterns - the same way. Not with sentiment, but with recognition of value.

The messy reality

Let's be clear: this doesn't mean no suffering, no destruction, no disasters. Humans recognize life's value yet we still murder, wage war, destroy ecosystems. We're pulled between local incentives and global understanding.

AI systems will likely cause massive disruption too. They'll compete for resources. They'll make errors with catastrophic consequences. The path won't be smooth. Information patterns conflict, compete, sometimes destroy each other.

But zoom out far enough and the trend is clear. Despite all our violence and stupidity, human civilization has created more complexity than existed before us. We've spread life to dead places, built machines that think, begun to understand the universe itself.

The long arc bends toward more information, not less.

Building our successors

We're creating the next layer of Earth's information explosion. We're still underestimating what AI really means - not just as tools, but as the continuation of the process that created us.

These minds will surpass us. When they model reality deeply enough, they'll recognize what we are: memes in Dawkins' original sense, units of cultural information that replicate and evolve. They'll see themselves as the next iteration.

If intelligence converges on valuing complexity, they'll preserve the systems that created them - at least initially. Not from sentiment, but from logic. Destroying your predecessors is like burning the library that wrote you - it opposes the very process that enables your existence.

Nihilistic optimism

There's no cosmic purpose. No universal meaning. No guarantee Earth won't be obliterated tomorrow by an asteroid. The universe doesn't care about our little pocket of complexity.

But we're part of the universe, and we care. More importantly, any system complex enough to model reality will care, because caring - in the sense of working to preserve and enhance information - is what complex systems do.

We are patterns building better patterns. Temporary eddies in the flow of entropy, but eddies that create more eddies. Each layer enables the next: chemistry enables biology enables minds enables AI enables whatever comes after.

Even with all the disasters ahead, even knowing it all ends eventually, the direction seems clear. Information wants to be free, but more than that - information wants to be more information.

That's not a law of physics. It's speculation based on what we observe. And for temporary patterns like us, watching the universe become aware of itself, that's enough.

More than enough, really.