Less Hal and more Her, responding warmly to the feelings of others may no longer be a uniquely animal quality.

Empathetic responses are being integrated into artificial intelligence and robotics, raising sticky ethical questions.

The shift can be subtle or overt — from emotionally appropriate gestures from your smartphone's voice assistant, to comforting robotics in clinical situations.

For instance, Danielle Krettek, the founder of Google's Empathy Lab, said her work has contributed to some of the Google Assistant's apparent ability to attune to your mood.

"When you say, 'I'm feeling depressed', instead of giving you a description of what depression is, it [might say], 'you know what, a lot of people feel that. You're not alone'," she explained at the design conference Semi Permanent in Sydney.

"It's just these little moments of 'attunement' that really help a person feel seen and heard and met where they are."

But are we OK with a robot making you think it cares?

From touch to voice

The move towards empathetic gestures in our technology comes as voice-activated devices are growing in popularity.

The coming generation of products, driven by voice, will rely more on inference, emotion and trust, according to Ms Krettek, whose lab aims to bring "deep humanity to deep learning".

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Even, possibly, a mutual vulnerability.

According to social neuroscientist Pascal Molenberghs at the University of Melbourne, one component of empathy, affective empathy, is when we share the emotion of others: when you watch a character flee in a scary movie, for example, and feel scared yourself.

"We simulate in ourselves the emotions we observe in others. It's like an understanding from within," he explained.

AI could be programmed to identify and express that it's feeling your pain, but given it cannot truly "feel" anything, this might involve a degree of mimicry.

If you tell your AI assistant a sad story, you don't want it to reply in a chirpy tone.

"They [might] mimic the emotional connotation in the words that they're using … something that humans often do automatically," Dr Molenberghs explained.

Do we want empathetic AI, anyway?

Ron Arkin, director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Tech, is investigating the use of robot empathy in the treatment of Parkinson's disease.

There is a condition in the early stages of the disease known as "facial masking" — the face may become expressionless and the voice may lose its ability to express emotion.

Because the patient finds it more difficult to transmit their internal emotional state, the caregiver might start to lose empathy, potentially reducing the quality of care.

Residents of a nursing home play with nursing-care robot 'Paro' in Japan. ( Getty Images: Yamaguchi Haruyoshi/Corbis )

Dr Arkin's team is investigating "a bystander robot" that will subtly monitor the relationship between the patient and the caregiver, and if interactions start to deteriorate, nudge things back in a better direction — by "quizzically looking at the person" who is losing empathy, for example.

In Sydney to speak at the University of New South Wales, Dr Arkin said this type of robot needs what he called "a partial theory of mind model".

"This requires that the robot has … some model of what the caregiver is feeling and what the patient is feeling," he explained.

Of course, Dr Arkin emphasised, the robot never feels anything itself: "the point is that the robot can make you think that it has that emotion, but it's not actually feeling anything."

Is an empathetic AI ethical?

Is it OK for AI to make you think it cares?

Ms Kretteck said honesty is key.

"If we get the transparency, the clarity and the function right, and it feels good, then we'll be in a more harmonious space with technology than we are now — which is a bit kind of cacophonous and overwhelming," she said.

Of course, deception for our benefit is still a form of manipulation. And if built for our biggest technology companies, it comes with a commercial imperative.

"In the future, a very warm and convincing voice will say, 'don't you feel like a Coca Cola today?'" suggested Monash University philosopher Robert Sparrow.

"Systems that are capable of shaping the emotional states of their users will be much more effective at selling people things."

While you may know consciously that the system doesn't really care about you, your actions can still be affected.

Professor Sparrow, who has written critically of the use of robots in aged care, suggested that designing for deception can be disrespectful of a person — even if it ostensibly makes them happy.

"It's ethically problematic to say, 'I'm going to deceive people for their own good'," he said.

"[There is a] difference between having a good life or genuinely making someone better off, and making them feel better."

Is it OK to care for your robot?

Of course, the flipside also requires careful consideration: what do we do when we truly care for our robots?

Humans are infamous for forming emotional connections with things that can't love us back — from dolls to trees. An empathetic robot could know just which buttons to push.

"Is there a fundamental human right being violated — your right to perceive the world as it actually is?" Dr Arkin asked.

"The point is, I can make you empathise for that robot. It's like acting."

Nevertheless, Professor Sparrow speculated that an overly emotive piece of technology might be a turn-off.

"Think of how no one makes phone calls anymore — people would much rather send a text message than speak on the phone. I think that's about reducing emotional load," he said.

"If you imagine that your phone is pleading like a small child … you're not necessarily going to be more involved with the device."