Compassionate AI for Moral Decision-Making, Health, and Well-Being

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) technology promises plausible increases to human flourishing, health, and well-being but raises concerns about possible harms and increased suffering. By making AI compassionate, the alleviation of suffering becomes explicit, rather than proxied, and potential harms caused by AI automation can be turned into benefits. Compassionate healthcare is beneficial for patient health outcomes and satisfaction and improves caregiver resilience and burnout. AI automation has many benefits but may interfere with patient care and autonomy. Incorporating compassion into healthcare reduces potential harms, increases health benefits and well-being, and can protect patient autonomy while providing more responsive and equitable care. Whether and how one conceives of AI as plausibly compassionate depends on ethical concerns and cultural context, including assumptions about human nature and AI personhood. Insights from Buddhism have contributed to scholarship on compassion and can extend incomplete Western perspectives on AI possibilities and limitations. Psychological research on the elements of compassion can guide development of compassionate AI and its incorporation into healthcare. Compassionate AI can be deployed especially into application areas where compassion plays an essential role with high demands on the compassion capacity of caregivers, such as dementia eldercare and palliative care.