The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

An insightful exploration of what social media, AI, robot technology, and the digital world are doing to our relationships with each other and with ourselves.

There’s no doubt that technology has made it easier to communicate. It’s also easier to shut someone out when we are confronted with online discourse. Why bother to understand strangers—or even acquaintances—when you can troll them, block them, or just click “Unfriend” and never look back? However briefly satisfying that might be, it’s also potentially eroding one of our most human traits: empathy.

So what does the future look like when something so vital to a peaceful, healthy, and productive society is fading away? The cautionary, yet hopeful, answer is in this champion for an endangered emotion.

In The Future of Feeling, Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips shares her own personal stories as well as those of doctors, entrepreneurs, teachers, journalists, and scientists about moving innovation and technology forward without succumbing to isolation. This book is for anyone interested in how our brains work, how they’re subtly being rewired to work differently, and what that ultimately means for us as humans.