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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07579 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07579/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03137/) (2016)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Inverse Reward Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02827/) (2017)
- [Moral Stories: Situated Reasoning about Norms, Intents, Actions, and their Consequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15738/) (2020)
- [Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09094/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.