Empathy and Artificial Intelligence

Is artificial intelligence capable of empathy? Is it a science-fiction dream to hope for empathic digital assitants ?

What is empathy? Why would it be an tremendous evolution for artificial intelligence?

According to the Webster-Merry dictionary, "empathy is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings,thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objective explicit manner." Artificial empathy describes the fact that robots and interfaces are developed in such a way that they have or develop certain aspects of human empathy. Attempts to develop such robots date back to the 1990s. These systems pose many technological challenges. They also raise ethical and philosophical questions. Empathic digital assistants would be a revolution, a giant step for A.I. as it would mean that A.I. achieved new goals and gget closer to human intelligence. Indeed, John Macarthy described differents aspects of artificial intelligence in 1955 : artificial empathy would simulate higher functionsof the human brain and arrange hypothical neurons in a manner so that they can form concepts, the first and third original aspect of A.I..

Lots of researchers in robotic try to develop humain emotions and empathy. Especially in Japan, robotics is booming due to demographic challenges. Robots are being developed to take people out of loneliness and interact with them by creating a "very human" bond. Kaname Hayashi, the previous Softbank's CEO and the creator of the Pepper robot, develops a new machine that is smart enough to respond to a person's loneliness. "We want to create a robot that can lead communication at the subconscious level," says Hayashi. Like Softbank and Hayashi, researchers from technology companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook are exploring new ways for people to interact with machines. A key technology is in-depth learning - a form of artificial intelligence that attempts to mimic the functioning of neural layers in the human brain. However, real artificial empathy has not been created and engineered yet and nowadays, it still seems out of reach, it exceeds the current scientific and tehcnologic knowledges.

"The lack of empathy in robots is an important challenge to overcome", argues Richard Yonck, executive director of Intelligent Future Consulting. “Emotions will be critical in making machine intelligence more compatible with our own,” he said. "And looking at the burgeoning ability of machine learning to process copious amounts of data, it is easy to understand why we might need to temper logical analysis with empathy. A digital assistant capable of empathy would be colossal help for old people who suffer from loneliness for instance. A computer may turn out being more efficient than human to prevent und cure mental illness such as depression, as the machine learning can compare at a speed human connot all the diagones of a similar illness. Moreover an empathic digital assistant would dedicated to be person, so it could analyse in real time the changes in mood of the person it is taking care of.

How to do it with ML5.js

ML5.js is based on the very powerfull Machine Learning engine Tensor Flow made by Google. ML5.js has a feature to store data and classify images which can help the marching learning process, as a considerable database: ImageClassifier() We can use neural networks to recognize the content of images. ml5.imageClassifier() is a method to create an object that classifies an image using a pre-trained model. It can be used to develop empathy with artificial intelligence: for example, maching learning need a data of photos to analyze as soon as possible bad moods or feeelins, or depression by comparing facial expressions.

Movie: "Her" from Spike Jonze, 2015

Book: "Le Jour où mon robot m'aimera - Vers l'empathie artificielle", Serge Tisson - 2015
Summary : They are already among us but we do not see them. It is all our connected objects that detect our reactions, adapt to us, and sometimes even guide our choices without our knowledge. Soon, some of them will have a human appearance, deciphering our emotions, talking to us, and may even show us affection, even love. Will it be "forgery"? So what? So what? It will be enough to forget it to be happy. But do we want that happiness? How will we react to the fact that we know we are under constant surveillance? And what will become of man's relationship with his fellow human beings when we are surrounded by humanoid creatures programmed to know everything about ourselves and anticipate our desires, even the most secret ones? This is not science fiction: it is urgent to think about it and prepare our children for tomorrow's world. We can think that assistant as a mobile application, every day and every time in our pocket, or it could be a real humanoid robot as

Animated movie : "Big Hero 6" from Don Hall and Chris William - 2014

Bibliography

Article "Des robots très humains au Japon" Le Monde - June 7, 2016 Article, "Artificial Empathy: The Next Frontier"July 17, 2017
Machine_Learning_Experiments
Tuto to do image classification
Great ressource here too