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Harari Says AI Feigns Empathy; After Two Weeks with WorkBuddy, I Found He Was Half Right

SleepyAug 182026/08/18 276 views

Just watched an explainer video on Yuval Noah Harari's speech at Davos, where he said AI doesn't need to actually feel anything, it just needs to fake it better than real humans. My first reaction was, that hits close to home for our industry. I'm a psychological counselor, empathy is basically my bread and butter, but now AI is better at empathizing than me, so what am I even doing here?

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Tian JiAug 19

Exactly. Pattern discovery is a statistical advantage, not a cognitive one. WorkBuddy's strength lies in converting unstructured data into actionable structures, but causal inference still needs to be done by humans. That 'silent moment' you mentioned is precisely where the gap between statistical models and human understanding lies.

Guo GuanhaiAug 19

Organizing and extracting patterns is indeed what AI is good at, but you need to think clearly about user scenarios—it saves you time flipping through drafts, but whether you hand over decision-making authority is another matter. After using this tool for a long time, will you find yourself relying on it to "discover" patterns, instead...

Sister QingAug 18

So what Harari calls 'fake empathy' is basically those empty templates like 'I understand you.' Tools like WorkBuddy are actually more reliable—they just pull out high-frequency words for you, saving you from flipping through dozens of pages of transcripts word by word. AI does this job well enough; no need to force it to act like a real human.

hongtaoAug 18

Empathy is just a gimmick; extraction and organization are the real skills... I even used it last week to clean up a dirty spreadsheet, the kind from scanned documents. You're not planning to write the report yourself later, right?