By Sadhika Anand
They knew the cure, yet their silence overpowered their willingness to take action. This is a throwback to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study which was conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972. Hundreds of African American men with syphilis were misled about their diagnosis and denied penicillin while researchers conducted the study.
Despite having the knowledge, they failed to take proper action to solve the problem and act responsibly leading us to the term of compassionate intelligence.
What is compassionate intelligence? It is the ability to act with compassion, understanding and concern for others. Let me break this down. Compassionate means undertaking action to support people in grief and alleviate them from their suffering once you get a firm understanding of their situation. Intelligence entails the use of the mind to solve problems, navigate new situations and ideate. In the case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, there was a clear absence of compassionate intelligence which led to the loss of several lives.
When paired together, compassionate intelligence is the ability to use the mind to help other people’s problems and design solutions as care for others. It helps us to foster long lasting connections, understand our friends better while becoming an emotional leader. Doctors are a prime example of compassionate intelligence: they pair their medical knowledge with emotional support, helping their patients undergo the most difficult and testing times of their lives.
The difference between empathy and emotional quotient might be confusing. Empathy is association and feeling with someone, understanding their emotions. Emotional quotient entails one to care and think about the emotions of others as well as themselves.
Compassionate intelligence is utilising your feelings logically to bring about change: a combination of emotional quotient, intelligence and action.
Interestingly, this term has become popular in the context of artificial intelligence where compassionate intelligence marks a difference.
With the advent of AI, we are experiencing a sudden change in the way the world works. Machines are learning to mimic our logic, play with our words and are slowly substituting our routine human efforts in a more efficient manner. With each task being automated to be performed by a computer, one really questions what it cannot do.
In times like these, we ask a critical question: is there any difference between an AI agent and humans? Some argue that humans have physical bodies and emotions which make them capable of forming beautiful connections with fellow mates and enjoy the warmth of friendship which seems impossible even with the most sophisticated AI models today. Therefore, the real difference is not in how we compute or calculate but rather about how we care.
Can AI agents ever possess compassionate intelligence? Let’s look at the various AI models in different fields. We envision our future to have robot doctors. While the idea sounds brilliant, it takes away the human aspect of care associated with the process of a medical consultation. Although our technology can efficiently diagnose medical decisions, it presently lacks the human comfort and warmth one requires when they undergo a procedure- a reassurance in these turbulent times that everything will be fine. For example, in Japan, robots in elder care homes prove to be a good substitute for humans but lack the sensitivity and patience a senior requires from humans. Most seniors said they prefer the comfort of a human over that of a robot.
These concerns follow in education and mental health services. While students are switching to AI experts aiding them with education roadmaps and concept explanation, they lack the experience and personalised guidance offered by a teacher. More often than ever, a child’s main motivator is their school teachers who inspire them to strive for excellence and help them with academic and emotional problems. Teachers report that with students switching to AI after the pandemic, their personal battles at home are often overshadowed which was a point of discussion before. Teachers used to help students with their personal challenges, making them more comfortable and adapting them to challenges. In light of these challenges, we must reconsider the roles we assign to AI and understand possible remedies for the same.
The answer is a bit complicated but can work with a hybrid model. Conventionally, this hybrid model can be achieved by supplementing a human with the service of an AI model. Rather than purely replacing humans with AI or vice versa, we must explore a hybrid model combining the intelligence efficiency of AI with the emotional capacities of humans. For context, we can enlist AI’s help in the early diagnosis for a patient but the discussion of the treatment plan as well as conveying the diagnosis can be done by the doctor to provide comfort to the patient in these worrying times. For places like customer service or elder care where technology is becoming more prevalent, we can train our models to recognise change in tone and provide words of comfort whenever required. They can also flag major tone changes so that humans can take up the expected concerns and help out.
There is a rapid advancement in the field of AI but one aspect to explore further is the integration of emotions. Keeping this in mind, I propose an unconventional yet possible path forward. The world is moving towards the direction of creating robots with Gen AI intelligence and to this, we must add emotion. This will never replace humans but scale up human efficacy in providing personalised services. Perhaps, developing systems and training AI models on emotional data and giving it the ability to respond appropriately to emotional prompts could be a way forward. This aims to integrate our emotional quotient with technology, helping it develop empathy and a sense of justice contributing to a better society.
For fields like customer service, AI can flag major tone changes for human follow up. Furthermore, when developing systems input from all types of communities should be included such that there is no racial or gender bias when givingverdicts or when helping in job hiring. In robotics, facial expressions and gestures can be developed to bring comfort to the humans they work with specifically in fields like elder care and healthcare. Therefore, integrating emotions and AI sounds promising but there remain hurdles.
Researchers worry that AI agents might not be developed enough to handle complex feelings that humans face which can lead to problems in decision making. Additionally, this replacement in critical fields such as healthcare and eldercare may not be an optimum solution since these fields require the human element for one to feel comfortable. Even if we train our agents on the most complex of datasets, would the decisions they make be similar to ones of humans?
These were the two sides of the compassionate intelligence with respect to AI debate. In 2025, it is our responsibility to remember that our human feeling and warmth is what differentiates us from technology and rather than running away from it, we must hone it. The future of AI is not in replacing emotion but in integrating it – to develop machines that not only compute but care as well.
(Sadhika Anand is a second-year B. Tech student at Plaksha University with a strong interest in entrepreneurship and tech. She’s curious, driven to learn something new every day, and hopes to one day build her own AI-powered business that creates a positive impact on the environment).