astro picture for the day - Empathy and fear

Doomed Star Eta Carinae 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt

A lot of scientists like to talk about empathy these days - much like Eric Drexler's disruptive buzzword.

Drexler talks on the one hand of recycling the industrial past, which I agree with.  But, then he says, whoa to those scientists/engineers that might disrupt the economic system because of a disruptive technology.

Empathy is especially used by A.I. researchers these days.  They think that by making empathetic robots, then we'll have good little robots  Kindof like the slave owners who would tell their slaves to be good little people, so they don't rebel and such.

A problem with an A.I. that decides to be empathetic to another's concerns, is what feelings and emotions it takes on. If the A.I. just empathizes with any person it interacts with, it could decide to take the side of some bully or irrational person.

The A.I. community has seen this already in Tay, the twitter chatbot.  Tay even has a wiki about it --> Tay (bot)

The Empathy A.I. community never acknowledges this contradictory thinking of their empathy concept, but I recently thought of a relation between this empathy and my findings on fear of facts/logic proving someone to be wrong.

Well, one more thing about empathy.  Empathy isn't a thing - like an apple, or a rock.  It's a concept, and I'd say it's a platonic concept - like the universe is made of earth, fire, wind, and water.  This is a flat-earth concept.  And, it's a platonic elements like concept that's like those bumper stickers you see on cars "baby on board, don't crash into me."

All my findings about fear, evasive language have been on the side of the person who doesn't want to be criticized, who doesn't want their beliefs criticized.  Empathy is more the physically weak rational person, who in the face of an aggressive non-reasoning person, just decides to take the aggressors side.  Essentially, he tells the aggressive non-reasonable person that he's right, and the aggressive un-reasonable guy goes and lives the rest of his life thinking he won the argument.

I'll go ahead and put up my favorite quote of this evasive language for those seeing this post and my points about fear and evasive language for the first time,

"People swarm everywhere, talking of incomprehensible matters, in hovels, streets and square, marketplaces, and crossroads. When I ask how many oboloi I have to pay, they answer with hairsplitting arguments about the born and the unborn. If I inquire the price of bread, I am told that the father is greater than the son. I call a servant to tell me whether my bath is ready; he rejoins that the son was created out of nothing."

 - To say the least, minus the relation to fear/evasive language, which I only made a couple of days ago!  I can't get the A.I. or any of these scientists to understand my points about empathy. So, we're heading for an A.I. world, and it's going to be an irrational one!