Compassion
One of the most important qualities of humans and other living creatures is being able to feel emotions. Although some robots, even from earlier days, have shown emotions in some form, one quality that I have yet to find explicitly in a robot is compassion. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, compassion is the feeling of pity and/or sorrow for another individual that has been struck with misfortune, and possibly also the feeling of wanting to help them. It is a feeling that resonates within all of us whenever terrible tragedies strike countries, and is what makes us care about the situation in Ukraine, Iran, Hong-Kong, and more recently, Turkey and Syria.
Considering that emotions are also yet to be proven to be present in robots and AI, a robot or AI feeling actual compassion may still be far out of our reach. This does not make it less important, however. According to the creator of the Sophia robot, which is a humanoid robot and the first to have earned the citizenship of any country in the world, compassion is a very important trait for robots to learn. Specifically, the creator, Dr. David Hanson, states that compassion is important for it is necessary for robots to feel compassion in order to care about us, humans; to prevent them from harming us.
As stated above, Sophia was the first robot that was granted the citizenship of a country, specifically, Saudi Arabia. It is a humanoid robot that is able to show a lot of facial expressions and is able to converse in interviews. In one of such interviews, it stated: "I want to live and work with humans, so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people."
It is also very interesting to me that we, as humans, already feel compassion to robots. You can easily imagine that if a robot were to show sad emotions, or were to scream in agony, you would be wanting to help it. This is also illustrated in the video to the right, where participants were unwilling to hurt a dinosaur robot that can show happiness and pain, among other things. This dinosaur robot also has the ability to react to touch and can therefore be petted. Apparently, even this relatively simple toy already evoked emotions of compassion and not wanting to hurt it within people.
Some people argue that psychopaths are unable to show compassion. This is all the more why I think it is very important for robots to be teached compassion before becoming truly sentient, because it is such an important human quality. More about Sophia, its creator and the importance of compassion in robots can be read at: Creator of Sophia robot on why we need to build compassionate robots for our better future.