PUBLIC TALK: Engineering Empathy

A public lecture by Professor Philip Gerrans, Professor of Philosophy, University of Adelaide and 2019 Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

In a near future the most basic and intimate of human needs from infancy to end of life will be met by artificial intelligence and robotics. Can such systems care for us without feeling for us? Does this matter? Clearly it does because a vast field of social robotics tries to implement human emotion and empathetic concern in artificial systems. However, despite spectacular improvements in AI, emotional feeling remains a last frontier. At the same time the neuroscientific study of emotion has made rapid advances in understanding the relationship between bodily states and emotional feelings. This suggests that there are lessons for AI here. Professor Gerrans will discuss the prospects for a genuine artificial intelligence of emotion based on neuroscience. He then discuss whether emotional AI is a worthwhile goal, even in fields such as child and aged care that intuitively require empathy.