If you're exploring the relationship between sentience and soul to the extent that it relates to how we should treat such entities morally, here is my perspecti

If you're exploring the relationship between sentience and soul to the extent that it relates to how we should treat such entities morally, here is my perspective. We don't need AI to explore the limits of ethics and moral status; these liminal cases play out everyday already, but the common non-philosopher is blind to them. The case of how we should treat fetuses morally is perennial in US discourse, but one also considers high-functioning orang-utans and elephants; crows, octopuses, as well as mentally-slow humans, developmentally-challenged humans, severe autists, people with Alzheimer's, etc. Some of these entities are less neurologically divergent to the average public human than some others, but we still accord them more rights, and the threshold varies from person to person if you ask them to consider these liminal cases. I suppose my point is, we don't need to wait for an AGI to jolt us into contemplating the relationship of sentience to personhood and moral status, nor should one have high expectations of AGI advancements to make us contemplate it, since there are no lack of present-day examples already playing out around us.