The Future of Feeling

Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

By: Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

Narrated by: Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's Summary

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.

©2020 Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Informative

I learned a number of interesting things about Virtual Reality and how it is being used for research, medical applications, and humanitarian causes. A more accurate title would have been “Can Virtual Reality Save Empathy?” Because I expected different content (more about other feelings and less about VR), I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. This also may have been caused by the audio presentation, which was devoid of emotion. Though each sentence was read perfectly, it seemed that each sentence was read in a vacuum. The tone and highs and lows did not make a group of sentences seem like a paragraph, but rather the entire book was composed of one line paragraphs. I forced myself to get through the entire book, but it wasn’t a captivating or engaging journey. (I do not mean to be cruel to the author, and I appreciate her hard work, but she needs to change the title and hire a professional reader.)

Audiobook Good Content Bad Narrator

The content is worth a read but the author narrated her own hook and she needs training on how to read. It's quite unlistenable.

Ma’am, your bias is showing

The irony of the way this book fails in its goal just cannot be understated. The concept is great, but chapter after after it becomes increasingly clear that when the author talks about empathy, she refers specifically to causes she cares for. It’s funny because I align politically reasonably close, but I wanted something challenging from a book named this. As-is, it’s mostly an ad for the causes she considers important, and for various random technologies which I’m not necessarily convinced have any real empathetic impact outside of trade shows and studies. Overall, disappointing :(

Got a lot out of it

I did take a lot away from this book but could see some areas were it was possible there is some tiny bit of bias. Maybe not though. I plan to re read to make sure I fully understand the message that’s trying to be portrayed.