Member-only story

Will Machines Ever Be Capable of Empathy?

Humans are magical creatures and no machine can replicate this magic.

Zita Fontaine
Towards Data Science

--

Image licensed from Canva

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?

Don’t change the subject. — source

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…

--

--

Responses (2)