Progressive Stages of Human Empathy

Huzaifa Sial is a designer and artist that works in the healthcare industry alongside artificial intelligence technology in creating and understanding better ways to treat patients -- he recently gave a talk about the empathy gap and how it all ties back together with his background. Sial spends a lot of time creating artwork and traveling the globe to gather a deeper understanding of human nature in terms of its societies, citizenships, cultures, and behavior. He was born in Pakistan, then raised in Nepal, grew up in Canada, and eventually moved to work in the U.S. This allowed him to understand different places from a first-hand experience and explore different sorts of societies and human behavior. Working in his field, he sees that technology has the ability to unify humans and that it will pave a path towards that.

Sial strongly believes that having a plurality in the way that humans express themselves, in the way they think, and see their values, is the key to progressing human empathy. He begins his talk by explaining how vast the world is, and that everyone experiences happy moments, as well as those that are sad, and traumatic. A specific set of thoughts tend to go through one's mind when they experience specific events but Sial reminds the audience that these questions and thoughts are merely assumptions. Through his travels, he realized that solutions don't have to have sacrifices because he found that all he had to do was authentically share parts of himself that he wanted to express without the burden of reflecting on other's reactions. As he shows, if this mentality can be understood and accepted, a space can be created to understand the commonality between us all.