At the start of 2021, as the world huddled in self-isolating atoms, a robot discovered empathy. In a study from Columbia Engineering, published in Nature Scientific Reports, lead author Boyuan Chen explained, ‘Our findings begin to demonstrate how robots can see the world from another robot’s perspective.’ This seems optimistic. In the experiment, the observing robot was predicting the busy bot’s future moves according to the logic of its present moves (is that a perspective?). I am not sure I would go as far as the study goes, calling this the glimmer of primitive empathy, because empathy has
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