Inhuman abilities: can AI be taught empathy

AI will never be able to feel, but it may well learn empathy and an adequate emotional response. Moreover, cars will soon understand and react to our emotions better than our loved one

About the author: Olga Troitskaya, a lecturer at MGIMO in cognitive sciences and decision-making, the founder of iCognito, a company that develops digital psychotherapy programs. The power of machines lies in their superintelligence, the ability to perform complex computational operations on huge amounts of data in fractions of a second. Not only does man have much more modest possibilities, but the whole being is irrational: our thinking is subject to distortions under the influence of emotions, external factors and noise. For a long time it was believed that despite the obvious weakness of people in front of machines in terms of intelligence, people surpass machines in their ability to feel. The machine does not have a biological body — it means that it will never be able to understand how limbs get cold from fear, breath intercepts in the chest from anger, and 'butterflies in the stomach' flutter from love. Consequently, AI will always lag behind the individual in the ability to empathize and empathize. But is it? Modern technology shows that AI can understand much more...