Meet the Expanding Empathy: Empathy & AI Speakers!

I'm a social cognitive neuroscientist at Hebrew U, but mostly an empathy researcher. I recently became interested in empathy and AI, both in terms of thinking about how we could make AI more empathic, but also about what are inherent limits of artificial empathy, and what we might still value more in human empathy and connection.

I am a social and cognitive psychologist interested in numerous topics, including effort and empathy. I have collaborated with Daryl extensively over the past few years building a framework to appreciate the extent to which two of my major interests are in fact intricately linked. This work has repeatedly shown that numerous forms of empathy are experienced as requiring effort, with people tending to avoid empathy (under some circumstances) as a result. I am interested in empathic AI because AI agents don't need to exert effort to express (to say nothing about actually experiencing) empathy. For this and other reasons, I am optimistic about the promise of empathic AI, though I think there are real risks, I also believe there are real opportunities to improve human welfare as well.

I am a neuroscientist who has been adopted by data scientists at Duke University, and my work focuses on how agents of all kinds (rodents, humans, AIs...) make social decisions and navigate behaviors that have impacts on others. Part of my work is dedicated to Moral AI (I recently published the book Moral AI and How We Get There with computer scientist Vincent Conitzer and philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong), and another part of my work is dedicated to social synchrony and how that contributes to empathy, moral judgments, and social behaviors. I am developing a new line of work at the intersection of those two research thrusts dedicated to empathic AI, including what we would need to build it, when we would and would not want it, and what it would look like.

I'm Gus Skorburg. I'm a philosopher who works in AI Ethics and many of my recent papers are about the ethics of AI in healthcare. I'm also working on a project related to ascriptions of moral agency and moral patiency in AI systems, and this work-in-progress will definitely benefit from the expertise present at this workshop. Very much looking forward to the discussions in a few weeks.

I’m a philosopher working on ethics and moral psychology. I recently co-wrote (with Mickey Inzlicht, Daryl, and Paul Bloom) “In Praise of AI Empathy” for Trends in Cognitive Science. https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(23)00289-9. I’ve also been working on a collaborative project with a partner at IBM, Kush Varshney, on empathy and AI. We’re exploring the ways that being empathized with honors a person's “right to be an exception”, and whether LLMs can honor this right.

I'm a postdoc at the University of Oxford (in both the Psychiatry Department and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics). My background is in developmental moral psychology, and I'll likely be talking about my data on what children think about the mental life and moral standing of robots. In another vein, I have some papers exploring the many challenges that arise in comparing human and artificial moral cognition, how we can leverage insights from developmental moral psychology to systematically test artificial moral cognition, and whether deep reinforcement learning agents engage in "true" non-rewarded helping behavior.

I am a philosopher who works on the philosophy of cognitive science (focusing on cognitive psychology and AI), especially as those fields intersect with normative considerations (my background is in epistemology, but I also work in ethics and the theory of action). Most of my recent work has been focused on how human values, rationality, and agency fit into an increasingly automated world. One of my current projects is on how human-centered artificial intelligence, as a research program, can preserve and amplify human practical capacities such as attention, rational planning, and empathy.

I’m an associate professor here at Penn State. I’m primarily a roboticist. My research centers on topics like human-robot interaction, human-robot trust, robot ethics, machine ethics, and evacuation robotics. With co-authors, I’ve written a book on robot ethics. One topic that I am very focused on is developing robots to assist evacuees during an emergency. As you can imagine, there are a lot ethical questions that arise. I’ve even developed some design guidelines for evacuation robots to help promote ethical development in this application area. A career goal of mine is to develop robots that can help deter active school shooters. I’ve also done a lot of work on the topic human-robot trust, often showing that humans tend to trust robots to much, a variant of automation bias.

I’m primarily a moral psychologist, and a good chunk of my work has focused on 1) the psychological foundations of proto-utilitarian beliefs about both harm and impartiality, and 2) the way that different decisions in moral dilemmas shape the way we respond and trust others, and I started thinking about how this might apply to AI. In the last year or two, I’ve been really fortunate to win a few large research grants to study trust in moral machines. My overarching goal was/is to understand the characteristics of AI agents that predict trust, the individual differences that make us more or less likely to trust AI agents, and the situations in which we are more or less likely to trust in AI. But as I’ve begun working on this, I’m increasingly taking a much more critical view about AI, and extremely interested in the way that narratives about AI shape the way we think and act in potentially harmful ways.

I'm a social psychologist at the business school at the Hebrew University. I work on morality, human-AI interaction, and their intersection. I'm interested in how the cognitive processes of mental-state attribution happen when people are faced with artificial agents and how it affects the way people think about them and respond to them. I have a paper on how attribution of prejudice affects people's reaction to discrimination by algorithms.

I'm Ali Ladak, a PhD student at Edinburgh University in Psychology where I'm researching people's moral attitudes towards AI, especially AIs as moral patients. I'm planning to talk about people's perceptions of AIs as moral patients at the conference. I co-wrote a short review of the literature on this topic here. Another recent paper I worked on looked at the effects of encouraging perspective taking on people's moral attitudes towards AIs.

I'm a computing science assistant professor. I run the Robots with Social Intelligence and Empathy (Rosie) Lab, aiming to develop robot AI software for smooth human-robot interaction. I'm enjoying reading your bios and work - for example Jason's paper on the right to be an exception dovetails into my 2014 work on robot empathy: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-014-0262-y. I went the extreme direction of making definitions for robot affective empathy, authenticity, etc, although my views on it are now more nuanced. Looking forward to discussing further at the conference!

I am a PI at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa), leading the lab “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction”. My background is Cognitive Neuroscience, but I have worked with robots (and in the area of human-robot interaction) for a long while now. Over the past 6 years, I have been addressing the question of whether (and under what conditions) people adopt the Intentional Stance towards robots. This has been the core theme of my large grant from the European Research Council (ERC) that was concluded in 2023. https://instanceproject.eu Recently, we have also started exploring the relationship between intentional stance and attribution of moral agency to the robots. In our experiments, we engage our participants in interaction with a physically embodied robot, we manipulate its behavior, or social signals it displays, and we examine how this impacts the degree to which participants attribute intentional agency to the robot. In addition to the fundamental research questions we address, we are also working on developing robot-assisted training protocols for children diagnosed with autism.

I study how emerging technology impacts moral systems. My research focuses on questions like how new technologies affect religious beliefs, how social atomization may worsen political polarization, and how AI programs can better reflect moral values. Lately my work has taken a turn to focus on LLMs-- how well they can model morality and how to improve the accuracy and representation of their moral judgments. I'll be sharing work at the conference building on this paper where we examined how well LLMs can predict moral judgments, and their potential for modeling social science phenomena more broadly.

I've recently worked with Mickey Inzlicht, Jason D'Cruz, and Paul Bloom on the upshots of empathic AI, namely whether and how people might benefit from receiving "empathy" expressions from chatbots, and how this may tell us something important about our motivations to give and receive empathy. My grad student Josh Wenger and I are also doing some empirical work in this space. I’m also doing some work with the Center for Socially Responsible AI with Alan Wagner here at Penn State, on how people make empathic choices for human and robotic agents.