If Empathy is a Skill Can It Be Automated?

(Or, what if your therapist were a computer?)

If empathy were truly a skill, nothing more, nothing less, than it can be programmed. Not only that, but machine learning should surpass humans, as it has in chess, simply because of its access to larger data sets.

For customer service, when texting with a bot, it seems obvious that empathy works. We know it’s a bot, and yet don’t care—it still works.

But…