Blush response: empathy and tolerance in AI systems

Abstract

Starting from the idea of using empathy as a useful way to identify an AI system indistinguishable from human beings, postulated in the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and in the film Bladerunner, some of the philosophical and ethical problems related to empathy and otherness raised by generative AI systems and those that a possible general AI system may raise, as well as their relationship with notions of tolerance, and democracy are reviewed. It is also postulated that the development of AI systems entails certain ideological and political aspects that constitute ethical problems, including the gradual decrease in empathy and the global political rise of intolerance.