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Can Artificial Intelligence Become Sentient?
Taking a look beyond the hype and the misconceptions
Every time there’s a significant development in the field of Artificial Intelligence (henceforth AI for the sake of brevity), boosters, journalists, and the naïve begin to talk excitedly about how machines will soon become sentient. As is the case with most technology-related social phenomena, most of the “thinking” we hear about is shaped by science fiction. And as we all know, there’s not much science in sci-fi but there is indeed a great deal of generally poorly-informed fiction. So will this always be the case with AI? Will boosters continue to babble about sentience as they mistake algorithm-generated outputs for Skynet-type consciousness? Or will AI one day truly acquire capabilities roughly equivalent to those possessed by the brains of animals such as primates, rodents, corvids, cetaceans, and cephalopods?
The first problem we face when attempting to answer questions like this is that we persistently fail to define what we mean by words like consciousness and sentience. Moreover, not only do we fail to define what we mean but we then treat our vague concepts as binary: something is either (i) sentient, or (ii) not sentient. This is very peculiar, because studies of humans over the last seventy years have conclusively demonstrated that we are at…
