Robots Must Be Designed To Be Compassionate, Says SoftBank CEO

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 30, 2015 @03:00PM from the why-did-you-program-me-to-feel-pain? dept.

An anonymous reader writes: At the SoftBank World conference in Tokyo, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has made a case for robots to be developed so as to form empathic and emotional relationships with people. "I'm sure that most people would rather have the warm-hearted person as a friendSomeday robots will be more intelligent than human beings, and [such robots] must also be pure, nice, and compassionate toward people," SoftBank's Aldebaran tech group will make its empathic "Pepper" robot available for companies to rent in Japan from October at a rate of $442 per month.

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How? by KermodeBear · 2015-07-30 15:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

And how, exactly, does one program a robot to be compassionate or empathetic?
Can emotion be reduced to a few simple formulas, some generic algorithms?
I'm not convinced.

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Love sees no species.
Simulated emotions? Big mistake by msobkow · 2015-07-30 16:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

The worst mistake we could make is to try to simulate emotions. That's what true psychopaths do -- simulate and fake their emotions.

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I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.