What struck me most about the blog was that I never thought about how empathy can be reproduced by artificial creatures. While I have thought about the reasons why a robot might act upon actions that were done to other robots, it made me think about how it would display empathy. 

One Idea is to create a group of artificial creatures that run on electricity. The amount of electricity that gets provided to the creatures is based on the amount of creatures that are alive and is always self-sustaining. Each individual creature has the option to share part of their battery capacity to other creatures. The creatures can see information about the other creatures battery status. 

As mentioned before, empathic behavior needs be instilled by fear in biological creatures. To give these creatures the incentive to share their current, there is an element of fear by introducing an additional mechanism that reduces the battery of a random creature by a certain percentage. This encourages the creatures to share their battery, as it is in their interest to keep as many creatures alive for long as possible. The act of sharing battery can be seen as empathic behavior, because the creatures don't have to share their battery to make themselves survive.

While it is partly debatable if this is empathic behavior or survival instinct minimizing risk of death, it would still be an interesting topic to dive into deeper. What does it exactly mean to be empathic? Is it solely based on our will to survive or is it purely meant keep our circle of peers as large as possible?