Realization of Empathy Capability for the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence Using an MXene(Ti3C2)-Based Memristor

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 13; no. 9; p. 1632
• Main Authors: Wang, Yu, Zhang, Yanzhong, Wang, Yanji, Zhang, Hao, Wang, Xinpeng, Xu, Rongqing, Tong, Yi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2024
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial intelligence; Critical components; Electrodes; Emotions; Empathy; Etching; Memory devices; Memristors; MXenes; Scanning electron microscopy; United States > US
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics13091632

Empathy is the emotional capacity to feel and understand the emotions experienced by other human beings from within their frame of reference. As a unique psychological faculty, empathy is an important source of motivation to behave altruistically and cooperatively. Although human-like emotion should be a critical component in the construction of artificial intelligence (AI), the discovery of emotional elements such as empathy is subject to complexity and uncertainty. In this work, we demonstrated an interesting electrical device (i.e., an MXene (Ti3C2) memristor) and successfully exploited the device to emulate a psychological model of “empathic blame”. To emulate this affective reaction, MXene was introduced into memristive devices because of its interesting structure and ionic capacity. Additionally, depending on several rehearsal repetitions, self-adaptive characteristic of the memristive weights corresponded to different levels of empathy. Moreover, an artificial neural system was designed to analogously realize a moral judgment with empathy. This work may indicate a breakthrough in making cool machines manifest real voltage-motivated feelings at the level of the hardware rather than the algorithm.