Borrowing from Iaian Banks' Culture universe, where aliens that are pretty much relatable as Earth humans (they're humaniform, even DNA-compatible reproductivel

Borrowing from Iaian Banks' Culture universe, where aliens that are pretty much relatable as Earth humans (they're humaniform, even DNA-compatible reproductively, just not from Earth) are designated "1.0" on a sapience scale. See [1] for a discussion of the difference between sentience and sapience. An entity well below 1.0 (Banks never specified, but reading between the lines it felt like 0.5) is considered sentient, but not sufficiently sapient to achieve self-awareness. Personally, I'd prefer a scale that goes negative, to establish a bright line test that accommodates for example, Downs Syndrome patients. We probably can claim 0.1 or 0.01 on such a scale. Interesting and left too undiscussed IMO are the economics of productizing what currently goes under the AI umbrella. It is so expensive, and such a big task to automate with even the shard of AI we pursue today, that the numbers in many (though not all) cases don't seem to pencil out unless the benefits can accrue to a few dominant oligopolic providers, from nearly all human-staffed positions where each individual position is largely dominated by a single low-cognitive skill repeatedly applied. But interestingly, lots of physical tasks are left alone, which seems to point to a weakness in that economic model: despite joking talk of the coming robot apocalypse upon jobs, human jobs that require diverse physical and perceptual engagement with the environment are nowhere near common automation. I see this in a lot of domestic household chores that have yet to experience disruption at the hands of AI. That's at least a 50M-count global market population willing to spend say, $2500-10000 USD per year on a robot that can in the beginning perform the housekeeping chores a hotel housekeeping crew routinely performs for every room. Be trainable on a per-item type basis to put up dishes and cutlery the same way into a dishwasher and back to storage, fold clothes and put them up, and mow the lawn: all highly-repeatable tasks that are only addressed by single-purpose, very expensive "AI solutions" today, tell me that if you are investing into any kind of general-purpose AI, invest long-range, like Uber-scale "point a money-hose at it" long-range. [1] http://www.rebekkahniles.com/2012/03/word-box-sapience-vs-sentience.html http://www.rebekkahniles.com/2012/03/word-box-sapience-vs-se...