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Will Machines Ever Be Capable of Empathy?
Humans are magical creatures and no machine can replicate this magic.
I was a lonely, weird child in the eighties who always longed for something that wasn’t there. I found my friends in the form of books and I had this dream that I read about in science fiction books about robots, that at some point in time we would have robots around us who could ease our pain of being lonely. A robot, who could be my friend — who would be there for me and comfort me when I needed, who would love me.
As I said, I was lonely.
Thirty years and many technologies later we are heading towards a future with artificial intelligence in an exponentially accelerated way. Mitsuku and Sophia today can become something incredible tomorrow.
I am an Empath and it makes me incredibly human and vulnerable to a fault. Would a machine ever be capable of empathising with me? Could it become empathetic — in a human way?
When we talk about artificial intelligence we soon get to the topic of artificial empathy. There are different schools that have their very distinctive opinions about whether a…