Artificial Inteligence and Empathy

Empathy is part and parcel of our functioning in the society thoughout our history. Nevertheless, technical advances faced us with a novel, yet key question of how to succesfully co-exist with robots (AI), in bussiness environment and at home. Are empathy and other prosocial emotions important in this context ? What are possibilities and is there a realistic need for that, for this kind of empathy ? In the field of Healthcare there is an increasing demand for AI development, especially in medicine and caring for patients. Socially assistive robots (SAR) are developed for taking over some parts of caring activities executed by the staff, especially more routine ones. SAR are caring, for instance, for a patient with dementia and thus contribute importantly to lowering risk of burn-out of the staff. Ethical and other questions are also widely discused. SAR can be effective tool in learning, for instance, of autistic children in order to improve their skills and functioning. With a view of AI »coming of age« in a step closer to a human, there is a dire need to develop also a field of emotions.