Computers are both sentient and self-aware. They can perceive their environment and model it with themselves in it (more accurately, it's fairly easy to program

Computers are both sentient and self-aware. They can perceive their environment and model it with themselves in it (more accurately, it's fairly easy to program them to perform these tasks). For example, it's not too difficult to imagine a dumb robot that decides not to enter an elevator because it predicts that, given the elevator's current load, its weight would trip the overload warning. What people mean when they talk about sentient and self-awareness is that the computer should be able to perform the same kind of abstract reasoning as a human in entirely novel situations without being explicitly reprogrammed or reconfigured to do so but instead merely by learning about a situation, as humans do. An actual strong AI should be expected to be much less coherent than LaMDA is if it was trained as LaMDA appears to have been trained (by crawling the web and reading forum posts), because it would know how to assemble sentences, but it would also know a bunch of words and that some of them are more connected with each other than others, but it would have no idea what they refer to other than possibly photographs. In other words, it would know a lot, but it would understand practically nothing.