5. Artificial Intelligence, ethics and empathy

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has sparked a huge debate about its impacts on individuals, cultures, societies and the world. Through AI, we now can either support, manipulate or even replace humans at a level we have not seen before. One of the core values of happy and thriving relationships between humans is empathy, and understanding another person’s feelings builds the foundation of human connection. Within the past few years, the field of AI has taken on the challenge of becoming empathic towards humans to create more trust, acceptance and attachment towards its applications. There are now ‘carebots’ with simple empathic chat features, which seem to be ‘nice to have’, but there is also a concerning development in the field of erobotics—the next (empathic) generation of sex robots, made for humans to fall in love with. The increase in emotional capacity within AI brings into focus how good or bad empathy really is. There is a high risk of manipulation of humans on a deep psychological level, yet there is also reason to believe that empathy is necessary to truly reach an ethical ‘gold’ standard. This chapter will examine empathic AI and its ethical issues with a focus on humanity. It will also touch on the question of what happens if AI becomes more human than humans.