I just finished the book The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. And while I got a great deal of personal wisdom from the book, I also found that the Buddhist philosophy of cultivating compassion and empathy to be an interesting angle to machine ethics and artificial intelligence design. The premise of one of the chapters is that human nature is essentially compassionate and gentle at birth and that anger, violence, and aggression are the result of the unbalanced development or misuse of our intelligence. Intelligence, the same intelligence that has allowed us to be masters of this world, that's not counterbalanced with compassion can become destructive. The way we are constructing our AI projects is starting with the intelligence.