Cross Fertilizing Empathy from Brain to Machine as a Value Alignment Strategy

AI Alignment research seeks to align human and AI goals to ensure independent actions by a machine are always ethical. This paper argues empathy is necessary for this task, despite being often neglected in favor of more deductive approaches. We offer an inside-out approach that grounds morality within the context of the brain as a basis for algorithmically understanding ethics and empathy. These arguments are justified via a survey of relevant literature. The paper concludes with a suggested experimental approach to future research and some initial experimental observations.