i don't think empathy is an appropriate word for this. It is defined as the ability to share the feelings of others. While in this case, what you want the robots to know is what most people would call 'common sense'.
What a strange response. You read that as me comparing human capabilities to roomba's?
The point, which you couldn't have missed more blatantly, is that one doesn't need to program every conceivable situation into an automaton for it to be able to behave properly in a whole range of normal situations.
But you have to program every conceivable 'normal' situations, so really you are just using a variable definition term like 'normal' to tautologically argue.
