Human Empathy in the Face of Affective Robotics

Research Perspectives on Empathic Interaction between Humans and Robots

Abstract

This contribution intends to propose a reflection on the experience of empathy in its multiple forms of manifestation: starting from the phenomenological analysis of the empathic experience proposed by Edith Stein and then reformulated by Max Scheler in the form of sympathy, we intend to focus on the dynamism of affective openness that characterizes human existence in its pathic nature to investigate, therefore, the possible declinations of artificial empathy on the basis of the most recent studies of robotic ethics. The last part of the contribution is dedicated to affective robotics and the possible impacts that robotic agents can exert on the human capacity to experience empathy and, more generally, openness to otherness. The implementation of the use of such robots, in fact, not only increases the forms of human-machine interaction by stimulating the cognitive and affective capacities of the subjects but poses new ethical challenges in order to re-understand the human pathos within an anthropology of the artificial.