Lola Cañamero, University of Hertfordshire, UK
‘Empathy’ is often regarded as a cognitive ability to understand and share the feelings of another, and opposed to ‘sympathy’ as being the affective capability of ‘feeling with’ another, and more specifically to have feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. Drawing on a view of empathy as a family of phenomena rather than on such clear-cut distinctions, and on an embodied approach to cognition, affect and robotics, in this talk Prof. Cañamero will discuss and illustrate some of the underlying mechanisms and capabilities that autonomous robots need to be “empathic” to various extents, and how they relate to different conceptualizations of “empathy”. Prof. Cañamero will conclude with some speculation on how such empathic capabilities might affect our views of and relationships with autonomous robots.
