Engineering Kindness: Building a Machine with Compassionate Intelligence

We provide first steps toward building a software agent/robot with compassionate intelligence. We approach this goal with an example software agent, EM-2. We also give a generalized software requirements guide for anyone wishing to pursue other means of building compassionate intelligence into an AI system. The purpose of EM-2 is not to build an agent with a state of mind that mimics empathy or consciousness, but rather to create practical applications of AI systems with knowledge and reasoning methods that positively take into account the feelings and state of self and others during decision making, action, or problem solving. To program EM-2 we re-purpose code and architectural ideas from collaborative multi-agent systems and affective common sense reasoning with new concepts and philosophies from the human arts and sciences relating to compassion. EM-2 has predicates and an agent architecture based on a meta-cognition mental process that was used on India’s worst prisoners to cultivate compassion for others, Vipassana or mindfulness. We describe and present code snippets for common sense based affective inference and the I-TMS, an Irrational Truth Maintenance System, that maintains consistency in agent memory as feelings change over time, and provide a machine theoretic description of the consistency issues of combining affect and logic.. We summarize the growing body of new biological, cognitive and immune discoveries about compassion and the consequences of these discoveries for programmers working with human-level AI and hybrid human-robot systems.