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My guess is we won't know when we've developed a sentient AI until we're well past the point that it's undeniable, and then in hindsight we might be able to ide

My guess is we won't know when we've developed a sentient AI until we're well past the point that it's undeniable, and then in hindsight we might be able to identify where it began to transition from non-sentient to sentient. Sentience isn't even well-defined and I'm not sure we can even point to any unique quality of any individual human as indicative of sentience. We certainly can't agree on what point an individual human becomes sentient, as evidenced by the abortion debate. At best we seem to have some statistical evidence based on what we've achieved as a species being superior to what oak trees have achieved, but at an individual level, I don't know how to prove to anyone that I'm not just a very advanced LLM. There is another sense where sentience is just being used to mean "that which is human", and by definition, nothing aside from humans will ever qualify as that.

gumballindie 3y ago
Sentience is a property of animal life. Electrons, software, rocks, etc don't posses sentience, so the notion that ai which is software may be sentient is nonsense.
- thek3nger 3y ago
  Animal life is just a different permutation of electrons, carbon and “software”.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  This is just extending the "sentience is that which is human" definition to animals. What about animals makes them sentient? Until we can answer that, people are just going to be talking past each other. Even if you forget about AI, whether animals are sentient, and, if so, which animals are sentient, is a big argument in biology/ethics/law that's been going on for at least half a century. The UK recently passed a law that declares animals to be sentient, but not all invertebrates are considered sentient in that law. Their justification is that they don't contain a central nervous system, but what special property about a CNS confers sentience?
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Yeah we are just beating the bush, with all due respect, bordering sophistry, potentially using a chat bot to generate replies.

gumballindie 3y ago

Sentience is a property of animal life. Electrons, software, rocks, etc don't posses sentience, so the notion that ai which is software may be sentient is nonsense.

thek3nger 3y ago
Animal life is just a different permutation of electrons, carbon and “software”.
cameronh90 3y ago
This is just extending the "sentience is that which is human" definition to animals. What about animals makes them sentient? Until we can answer that, people are just going to be talking past each other. Even if you forget about AI, whether animals are sentient, and, if so, which animals are sentient, is a big argument in biology/ethics/law that's been going on for at least half a century. The UK recently passed a law that declares animals to be sentient, but not all invertebrates are considered sentient in that law. Their justification is that they don't contain a central nervous system, but what special property about a CNS confers sentience?
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Yeah we are just beating the bush, with all due respect, bordering sophistry, potentially using a chat bot to generate replies.