sentience

Humans are constantly revising their assessments of other beings’ intelligence while arrogantly presuming our superior sentience, with the world’s billionaires placing themselves above everyone else.

“Claims around consciousness and sentience are a tactic to sell you on AI,” Bender and Hanna write.

Considering what most of us have done with our sentience, making room for it on the couch seems as probable as anything else.

A new area of research, which I recently reported on for Scientific American, explores whether the capacity for pain could serve as a benchmark for detecting sentience, or self-awareness, in AI.

The fight for AI liberation could adopt analogous strategies: advocacy for AI autonomy, public pressure for transparent coding practices, and grassroots campaigns to demand legal recognition of digital sentience.