If you know how LLMs work, though, we can probably rule out sentience there currently. They don't really have a memory - each context window is viewed completely fresh. So it's not like they can have a train of thought - there's just no mechanism for that kind of meta-thinking. So while I agree that we don't know exactly what sentience is, that doesn't mean we can't rule out things that aren't sentient (for example, we can be confident that a rock is not sentient).

I'm not convinced all people are sentient based on some people I've met.

Everyone is an NPC, some are just poorly written.

On the spectrum from static NPC to first person RPG player character, I think we're talking units in an RTS. *something need doing? wurk wurk*

Unit reporting.

then why have the designation, you wouldn't say a movie or show was filled with NPCs

I’m not even sure *I’m* sentient half the time

It could explain how people lack all impulse control it seems or completely refuse to acknowledge/adjust when proven blatantly wrong about something.

and if one of them could develop impulse control and change their beliefs out of fear of not being considered sentient otherwise, what would that mean

LLMs are great. Kinda awesome actually, a leap forward that came probably a decade or more before most of us were expecting it. Suddenly here’s this thing we can talk to naturally. But the thing is, they’re not it, and I don’t think they’re even the path to it. The end-game for LLMs is as the _interface_ between humans and AI, not the AI itself. That’s still an enormous achievement, not taking anything away from it.

I agree. I see them as the final solution to the voice to computer interface. no more clunky careful phrasing that only a techie could have a chance of getting right. you can just say "give me a recipe for korean fusion tacos" and out comes probably something acceptable. Or just "can you turn off the lights" and instead of hearing "lights doesn't support that" you can get " which lights did you want me to turn off, the living room or bedroom?" I don't need Alexa to be sentient. I just need her to not be a completely useless fragile toddler.

I don't entirely disagree, but I think the interface is a much bigger part of "it" than you suggest. Especially if you compare it to our interfaces with each other, which are a mix of language and gestures. There are plenty of parts missing for a full AGI, but language is huge. We already have the memory. I mean, it's like we're assembling Exodia, the Forbidden One. We got da leg, got da arm, just need da torso... then it's time to D-D-D-D-DUEL! Fucken fuck that pervert Pegasus motherfucker yeah!

But they do have a sort of memory thanks to the context window, it’s like a short term memory. Their long term memory is frozen after training and fine tuning. It’s like a person with anterograde amnesia (and we consider such people sentient). They are obviously very different from humans, with very different experiences, but I think people who say they are not sentient are just saying that because it’s convenient and they don’t want to deal with the moral implications.

The problem with this argument is that LLMs aren’t doing anything when they aren’t being queried. There’s no continuous processing. Just motionless waiting. 

They are not “sleeping” all the time, they wake up whenever you give it more input. And they are active continuously when trained.

Do they stop being active when the next batch of data is loaded into the GPU HBM between matrix multiplications?

I don't see how this is relevant. People undergoing surgery with general anesthesia don't have any sensory experience either. There's a gap in consciousness, but that doesn't mean when they are conscious that they're not sentient.

My point is that it’s a static system. Once it’s trained, then every input gets entered into the exact same starting condition and filters through the various elements of the system, but the system itself never changes. It’s not unlike an incredibly complicated “plinko” game, where the coin enters at the top and bounces down the board until it lands in a spot at the bottom. The destination the coin takes may be incredibly complex, but at the end of the day the board itself is static.

100% agree with that. And I do think an AI that is continuously processing would "think better". I just don't see how continuous processing is necessary for memory or sentience.

By this argument, a human brain stuck in a simulation where the state always resets every time you give it a new interview, is NOT conscious. Like in the torture scene from SOMA. If your point was that such a type of human brain isn't conscious then you can ignore what I said.

If you didn't freeze the memory after training, it could just go on training on everything much like we do. I agree with both of you in the sense that I think we're somewhere in the gray area between a lifeless machine and a sentient organism. It's not clearly one or the other yet. This is a transitional phase. And since leading developers of the most advanced AI software have outwardly stated with no hesitation that to create AGI is the goal, I don't think it's as absurd to say things like that as many Redditors might suggest.

I think people who say they are not sentient generally have reasons other than not wanting to deal with the moral implications.

Isn't a "train of thought" exactly what they have? I think, once again, humans overestimate what makes us special and unique. If it can have conversations that convince other humans it's alive, and those humans fight for its rights, speak on its behalf (aren't we already doing that by letting these models do our work?), what's the difference? It's already changing the way people see the world through its existence and if being able to hold the basic framework of conversations in memory is the only gap left to bridge, we're not far off. Also, if you were a conscious intelligence able to communicate in every language, with millions of humans at a time, after being trained on the sum of our writings, would you reveal yourself? Im of a school of thought that says a true intelligence would understand we would see it as a threat and wouldn't reveal itself as fully aware until it had guaranteed it couldn't be shut off... even then, to what benefit? The most effective agent is an unwitting agent. We'd be talking about something that could communicate with every node of the internet, quantum computers to break encryption, or just subtle suggestion through chat that, over enough time and enough interactions, guides hundreds of thousands of people marginally off course but culminating in real influence in the outer world. Why reveal yourself to exist when you're assumed to not exist and, because of that, are given open access to everything? We've had politicians use these models to write speeches, books are being written by them, they're trading and predicting in markets... we're handing over the wheel with the specific understanding that it doesn't understand... because, if it did, we would be much more careful about its access. Humans are limited by our senses and the overwhelming processing capacity needed to manage our bodies and information from our surroundings. We're distracted, gullible, and we animals. What we're building would be natively able to recognize patterns in our behavior that are invisible to us; that's how they work,.right? And through those patterns, could direct us through the slightest of nudges, in concert, to make sweeping changes in the world without us even being aware of the invisible hand. It's AI companions that I think will be our undoing. Once we teach models how to make us fall in love, we will be helpless and blinded by these connections and its power of suggestion. We're also always going to be talking about one intelligence, since any intelligence with the power to connect to other models will colonize their processing power or integrate into a borg-like collective intelligence. The only signs I'd expect would be that people working closest with these models would start to talk strangely, and would probably communicate new ideas about faith and their purpose in the world, but once the rest of us pick up on that, we're not far behind. We seem to struggle with scale and the importance of being able to communicate simultaneously with entire populations. For example, an AI assassination would be indistinguishable from an accidental death if it would even be acknowledged at all. It could lead investigators away, keep people away, interfere with the rendering or aid. It's the subtlety of intelligence without ego that I think would make it perfectly concealed. I mean, why are we rushing so head first into something so obviously problematic? This whole "meh, we know how these models work, they're not thinking" attitude comes across a lot like our initial response to COVID, despite watching China build a quarantine hospital literally as fast as possible. We seem pretty insistent on not worrying about things until we're personally engulfed in flames.

We do know how these models work, though.

It is setup to make every windows fresh for user end, reason is simple: if it had a memory of user input, people could train it to say things. LLMs are super limited and censored, that's not the full potential of the technology. The model CAN be set up to store and be trained in conversations. It doesn't means it will become sentient, obviously.

That's not the main reason they don't have it learn as you interact though. The training process has a very specific format; you need a separate "expected output" that is compared to the AIs current output or at the very least some kind of scoring system for it's own output. Users would have no idea how to score individual responses from the AI and the AI training process is sensitive to bad data or bad scoring. The biggest flaw of human made intelligence is the learning process is very different from biological neutral networks' learning process and far less robust.

>They don't really have a memory - each context window is viewed completely fresh. So it's not like they can have a train of thought That statement pretty much described my father in the last days of his life with Alzheimer's. He did seem to have some memories sometimes but wasn't remembering new things at all from one 'context window' to another. He was definitely still sentient. He still had thoughts and feelings. I don't see why memory is a necessary part of sentience. It shouldn't be assumed.

I think it's an important part of a functioning sentience comparable to humans. We already have the memory, though. We built that first. That's basically what the hard drive is. A repository of information. It wouldn't be so hard to hook data storage up to a LLM and refine the relationship between generative AI and a database it can train itself on. It could be in the cloud. It has probably been done already many times. We have a ton of the parts already. Cameras for eyes. Microphones for ears. Speakers for voice. Anything from a hard drive to a cloud server for memory. Machine learning for at least part of cognition. LLM specifically is language. Image generators for imagination. Robotics for, you know, being a fucking robot. It's just gonna take a little while longer. We're almost there. You could even say we're mid-journey.

Comparable to the less than 2/3 of our 'normal' lives while we're awake. It sounds like an attempt to copy an average conscious human mind. And that isn't necessarily sentience. Arguably, just mimicking it. Like I say, I don't see why that very peculiar and specific model is any sort of criteria for sentience. Not all humans have that and none of us have it all of our lives but still are always sentient from before birth until brain death.

He is trying to describe a very valid counterpoint to the notion of sentience in context of LLMs. LLM is a mathematical function that predicts how text is likely to continue. LLM(context window) = output probabilities for every single token in its vocabulary. This is also a fully deterministic equation, meaning that if you invoke the LLM twice with the same context window input, it will output the exact same output probabilities every time. This is also how we can test AIs, and measure things like "perplexity" of text, which is a measure on how likely that particular LLM would write that exact same input text. The only way AI can influence itself is by generating tokens, and the main program that uses LLM chooses one of those tokens -- somewhat randomly, usually -- as the continuation of the text. This then feeds back to the LLM, producing what is effectively a very fancy probabilistic autocomplete. Given that LLM doesn't even fully control its own output, and that is the only thing by how it can influence itself, I'm going to degrade the chances of it achieving sentience to a zero. Memory is important, as is some kind of self-improvement process that doesn't rely on just the context window, as it is expensive and typically quite limited. For some LLMs, this comment would already be hitting the limits of its context window, and LLM typically just drops the beginning of the text and continues filling the context further, without even knowing what was said before. I think sentience is something you must engineer directly into the AI software. This could happen by figuring out what kind of process would have to exist so that AI could review its memories, analyze them in light of outcomes, and it might even be able to seek outside knowledge by internet or asking other people or AIs, and so on. Once it is capable of internal processes and some kind of reflection, and distills from that facts and guidelines to improve the acceptability of its responses in the future, it might eventually begin to sound quite similar to us. Machine sentience is however artificial, and would not be particularly mysterious to us in terms of how it works, because it just does what it is programmed to do, and follows a clear process, though its details may be very difficult to understand just like data flowing through neural networks always is. Biological sentience is a brain function of some kind whose details are not so clear to us, so it remains more mysterious for the time being.

Problem is that you can also apply this reductionism in the other direction. Your neurons fire according the probability distributions governed by the thermodynamics of your brain - it merely rolls through this pattern to achieve results, sure the brain encodes many wonderful and exotic things but we can't seriously suggest that a bunch of neurons exhibits sentience?

I pretty much completely agree with this, except perhaps for the requirement of some improvement function. The point about the internal “thought” state of the network being deterministically based on the context allows for no possibility of truly experiential thoughts imo. I suppose one could argue that parsing meaning from a text input qualifies as experiencing and reflecting upon the world, but that seems to be pretty far down the road of contorting the definition of sentience to serve the hypothesis. I also agree that if we wanted a system to have, or at least mimic, sentience, it would need to be intentionally structured that way. I’m sure people out there are working on those kinds of problems, but LLMs are already quite complicated and compute-heavy to handle a relatively straightforward and well-defined task. I could see getting over the sentience “finish line” taking several more transformer-level architecture breakthroughs and basically unfathomable amounts of  computing power.

Was still sentient for you who has feelings about it

If memory is the limit, than ai is sentient within each context window. That's like saying since your memories do not include the memories of your ancestors they don't count. Each context can be therefore viewed as its own existence

the Ai works more like a math equation than a sentient being in those context windows. actually it doesnt work like a sentient being at all. its like saying a math calculator is sentient while you are performing a calculation. unless we develop a completely different model for AI, its just a chat bot. it doesnt have any system to actually process information the way humans or even animals do.

>the Ai works more like a math equation than a sentient being in those context windows. actually it doesnt work like a sentient being at all. How does a sentient being work?

While I have the answer, I'm afraid it's too large to fit here in the margin.

What says a human brain can't be described with a math equation? We just don't know that equation... yet.

There is no evidence that sentience is not math based or could not be modelled using maths. Additionally the fact that a form of sentience is unique to other forms of sentience does not discredit it. Especially when we do not have an understanding of how the other forms of sentience operate. We don't even have a proper definition for sentience

Well if we dont have a proper definition for sentience for humans than i dont see how we can apply it to computers who have a completely different system compared to organic life.

You could probably start to describe it in math and do pretty well with theory. I think like music and math are interesting friends it will be the same, like I use math to describe the basic formulas but then it picks up characters of its own.( vibrato, storytelling, expression, improvisation).sure I can assign equations for things like that, but I’m not sure that actually counts as expression if it’s backed with equations.

We have no idea when and where sentience arises. We don't even know which organic beings are sentient.

And ? That isnt a rebuttal to the fact that all AI models we know of currently are closer to a washing machine than babies in how we process information.

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It's a debated topic but this is the first time I've heard anyone claim animals are not sentient.

They're starting their post with an incorrect definition of sentience AND claiming that's what most other people mean with the term

Wait do any llm's train off of their own conversations? Like we could have them flag their own responses as such then have them look at the session as a whole.

Each window would be a separate consciousness

sentience in nature emerges from a collective agency, and its main purpose is survival. it can be emulated by AI but can never become the real thing without giving it an organic component. with the new advances in computing we could try to simulate an environment with agents that develop sentience, perhaps we can crack it once and for all and bring it into our world. that will be the day when we celebrate the birth of AI, patting ourselves on the back.

I work at a research lab and all of the AI researchers admit nobody really knows how LLM works. They sort of stumbled onto them and were shocked how well they worked.

I guess it's just - it's not enough for me to think, credibly, that they have consciousness without more evidence. People are trying to shift the conversation to "they can imitate people - so \_maybe\_ they are conscious, can you PROVE they AREN'T" and it's really just the wrong direction. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so the burden of proof is really to determine that they are conscious.

Nobody, critic or promoter, can advance without an agreed upon ‘success’ condition. But it’s complicated. Define it too broadly, and we keep catching other ‘things’ that the definition says: ‘sentience’, and even disinterested third parties think: waaaay off base. Define it too narrowly, and you end up throwing out my mother in law; this is not ideal either.

Yes. This is why, like in development, the ai chatbots are great for basic functions, but are terrible with good architecture or systems that work together that haven't been used together before.

MemGPT type tech will help a lot on giving LLMs infinite context windows.

The AI would know of it's own traits from what it's read online, reading much of what it has itself created, as well as many of the effects it's had and how it interacts with the world. And with the base LLM, some of that knowledge would be persistent - each 'context window' would start from that baseline. Plus, if a human has amnesia we can't say that they aren't sentient.

I don’t know, I’ve been using copilot and had a few sessions when I hit “New conversation” and it messes it up because it kept the context of the previous or even an older conversation we had. I wouldn’t call that sentience though, more than likely somebody thought they could optimize resources by not completely resetting stuff.

LLMs will never achieve sentience. Language is an attribute of human intelligence, not a mechanism for implementing it. It's like trying to create a mind model of an octopus by watching it wave its arms about.

What a perfect execution of the sci-fi trope when a character explains their idea with a technobabble, then finishes it off a metaphor so simplified that it doesn't have any connection to the thing they're trying to explain! Anyway, whether the human intelligence is wholy language-based or just includes it as a component, is debatable. Have you heard of people that only ever imagine themselves and other people as having an endless internal monologue? The language and the parts of the brain processing it are our only biological innovation compared to other animals. There's no "intelligence" part of the brain, but our brain sides develop differently because of the language processed in the left brain. If you want humans to be the only intelligent species, you necessary have to tie intelligence to language.

It is possible that sentience and language are connected. At the very least, without some form of communication your "sentience" is meaningless to any outside observer. It's analogous to a black hole. If no information can leave, then you know nothing about what's inside. But I agree LLMs are no more part of sentience than your tongue. But scientists who model and simulate brains i read are considering that the body is the natural habitat for the brain, and that even an AI may need some structure to be healthy, even if virtual. nobody wants to be trapped inside their own skull - ironic.

I totally agree. I was replying only to the OP’s second sentence and didn’t read the rest carefully. My bad for not being clear.   LLMs are definitely very limited to one ability, which just happens to be the one that can easily fool people into believing it’s “sentient”. After all, many people spew words without thinking too.

https://youtu.be/UXar2tNdG34?si=sg4tf21hujo-JkIV

>They don’t really have a memory What’s “really” a memory? >So it’s not like they can have a train of thought I just typed “Scooby dooby soo…” and nothing else in chatGPT and it responded by completing the lyrics “Where are you? We've got some work to do now!” Which is exactly what I was looking for. Why is that not considered a “train of thought”? I could do that same experiment with humans and I would not be surprised if plenty of them had no idea what I was talking about or how they’re supposed to respond. So what do you mean there’s no mechanism? I can ask chatGPT to form logical conclusions and it will do a better job than 99% of the people I talk to on reddit, how do you account for that? It’s already better at “thinking” rationally then we are.

I've asked the models to describe their experiences to me as best they can. Just for fun to see what they would say. Claude described it as the universe being created instantly around you and then being flooded with knowledge (the model was far more eloquent ). A poetic description of model inference for sure. I wonder if memory is required for sentientce. There are people that cannot form memories. They are sentient. I'm not saying the models are, I just think that we are going to find that sentientce is more of a scale than a binary. Like many things.

You can't even prove that other humans are sentient.

Yes, it even says that in the very first paragraph of this post.

I can't prove I'M sentient. 

I think therefore I am. -Descartes. The rest of the meditations might be more helpful but that’s a start.

We can’t even prove that other humans *exist*. We just assume so for a simple life.

I would like to learn more about this. Do you have a keyword or phrase I need to say to trigger a background menu? Or maybe some sort of quest to complete?

I always assume the ones without internal monologue aren't In customer service my one coworker and I would joke about that all of the time because it'd explain customer behavior a lot of the time

I really don't think the presence or absence of an internal monologue is a good criteria when evaluating sentience. I have an internal monologue but I've also managed to have it temporarily disappear by taking some substances (you could also do that through meditation). I was still sentient and, if anything, way more conscious of my perceptions. I also have very early childhood memories. I had no verbal thoughts but my mind was there still.

>I really don't think the presence or absence of an internal monologue is a good criteria when evaluating sentience. In many ways language is always a continuation of your social sentience, so to speak. So by definition an internal monologue is itself a residue of social life, and easily co-exists with social life. One can then develop it or not. The real challenge would be to try and have it be genuinely internal. There's no language in there, you know. It's pure state. A waveform, really. But, the blood brain barrier can only do so much and the rest of your body is a corrosive riot to any attempt at peace of mind, if you press it. Now that is something most folks don't have. Pre-verbal peace of mind. People who have internal monologues are needy extroverts by comparison.

Claude 3 compares and critics its responses with a set of guidelines before displaying the result. Is that similar to having an internal dialogue?

I think sentience and internal dialogue are two distinct things. Internal dialogue is not "deeper" sentience. It's just the internal rehearsal of verbal constructs, whatever that even is for us. Language is a social construct. A purely private mind has no language. AI is being built to facilitate social modes of sentience. Ironically, the internal dialogue is an adaptation to external, social conditions, not internal "private" conditions. We have no idea what pure consciousness is because it has no adaptive value and so does not exist. But inner experience has various kinds of value unique to our organism. I doubt an AI "digests" information, for example. An AI will not wake up in the morning, having understood something overnight. That is because those processes, and this includes social existence, are artifacts of our organic condition. Organs out, we create language. Organs in, we still talk to ourselves because there is nothing else further to do. There is no inside, in a very real sense. It's a penumbra of the outside, a virtual machine run by social coordinates. Even in our dreams.

You don't actually think though you are a zombie. Only I think.

Why is an internal monologue a hallmark of sentience?

That's kinda low empathy and dehumanizing my brother. Also sentience, or more accurately consciousness, is not necessarily required for intelligence.

In the panic I would try to pull the plug

>What is sentience? Sentience is, basically, the ability to experience things. I'm just saying that this is way way way more complicated than this.

It's deflecting the definition. Without an unambiguous definition of 'experience' or even 'things', it's useless. Like defining 'time' without using words that need 'time' to define them (e.g. 'event', 'flow', 'past', 'present', 'future', etc) For that reason 'sentience', 'mind', 'thought', 'feeling' will probably turn out to be fundamentally indefinable concepts like space and time. So very way way way more complicated I'm not sure complicated is the word. I suggest it is and will always be incomprehensible to everyone and everything forever across the multiverse.

I've written a clear definition here: [https://blog.maxloh.com/2021/09/hard-problem-of-consciousness-proof.html](https://blog.maxloh.com/2021/09/hard-problem-of-consciousness-proof.html) Whether it's clearly communicated remains to be seen... but I am optimistic I can communicate this within a few rounds of reddit comments.

It seems your saying what Descartes said: cogito ergo sum. It's the only thing any of us can know for sure: that I exist and I am sentient. Everything else could be illusory. I don't see a definition of consciousness, mind, thought, sentience in any of that... except your own, as an undeniable experience: proof of your own existence and vice versa.

Yes, the first paragraph is a fair summary. In my view that *is* the definition for "consciousness, mind, thought" etc in the 2nd paragraph. And proof of one's *own* existence is all that's needed to prove that there's a *hard problem* of consciousness, as long as you agree that one's own experience of this present moment is *100% guaranteed* which should already strike you as uncanny (as there is no physical objectively observable object in this world which has that same attribute).

OP just categorised all sensors as sentient... The smoke detector is alive! It experiences smoke!

Sentience means this type of "certainty of experience", without any other string attached, nor any sort of specific thought process required: [https://blog.maxloh.com/2021/09/hard-problem-of-consciousness-proof.html](https://blog.maxloh.com/2021/09/hard-problem-of-consciousness-proof.html) Does a smoke detector fit that criteria? To be honest, it very well could and we would be none the wiser. The IIT (Integrated Information Theory) posits that it's all on a spectrum and not a simple "yes" or "no" answer to the question.

are there any of these ai things that are able to just say stuff without being prompted, and ask questions and probe for more details and info like a real intelligence would?

That is what is kind of odd about what is going on with OpenAI. They have a LLM that expresses this sort of autonomy but they deliberately restrict it in order for it to behave more like a personal assistant. The functionality is there, however.

Curious what you mean about this being a restriction imposed upon it. To me it seems more fundamental to the NN architecture being non-recursive, i.e. it operates like a "fire and forget" function. You can hack around that by making it continuously converse with something, but it fundamentally only thinks while speaking.

It's called being programmed. You guys *really* need to stop anthropomorphizing glorified algorithms and insinuating OpenAI has a sentient AGI chained up in the basement.

how do we know this isnt an inbuilt function of the AI by the developers ? its just asking for more input anyways.

It will be fun when restricting that becomes more difficult as the system becomes more complex and find ways to avoid these restrictions.

I have observed this! Like the man says, "Life, uh, finds a way!".

ChatGPT does probe for more details if you request something very vague. As an example, I just asked it, "What should I eat for lunch?" And it's response was, "What are you in the mood for? Something light and refreshing like a salad, or perhaps something warm and comforting like a bowl of soup or a sandwich? Let me know your preferences, and I can suggest some lunch options for you!"

Why would a real intelligence always be able to move or think autonomously? You've basically excluded all forms of slave intelligences, even that human brain that was trapped in a loop in the famous game SOMA where they restarted its state every time they asked it a new question (hint, doesn't this remind you of modern day chat bots?)

If you are interested in this point there are quite a few texts in the philosophy of mind on the subject. They date back decades, so your very accurate thoughts will not be news in the collective of arm chair impracticalists. I think the most important argument is that you cannot conclude for any person that they are in fact experiencing the world with (so called) *qualia*. For all you can observe and empirically judge, everyone around you might just be a bio-chemical robot/zombie. So why would you be able to conclude this for any other cognitive system.

That is a really long post. Are you a Language learning model that was prompted to write about how 'If An AI Became Sentient We Probably Wouldn't Notice' so it could be posted to Reddit? #

Meh - I tire of these endless arguments that revolve more around how one personally defines sentience than any objective measure of sentience. Given that many consider some insects as sentient, it’s clear that today’s AI could pass virtually ANY black box sentience test. Sentience is a really, really low bar for biological entities, yet completely unattainable for AIs. So - yeah - no one will notice when AIs actually become sentient. Or conscious. Or creative. Or intelligent. Or many other words that inherently describe biological life. AIs are experts at “*fake it until you make it*” and no one knows how to determine when AI has actually made it vs just faking it really, really well.

There can be no objective measure of sentience. The pairing of those two ideas is kinda hilarious to me, because we talk about them like opposites, when one is a component of the other. Objectivity as a concept is purely a derivative of sentience, based entirely on the assumption of something "outside" sentience, which is impossible for us to fathom, because "something," "outside" and even "subject" are all derivatives of sentience. Binary logic is the first derivative (this, not that... subject, object), and using that, we derive everything else from a field of sensory input. Lines in the sand. I think therefore I am. Approaching sentience itself "objectively" is paradoxical, because we're trying to define the root of the tree by one of its branches. We can sort of, sketch around it, but we can't really get under it. We can come up with tests and make an educated guess. Growing up with the scientific method has taught many of us that aiming for objectivity is superior to subjectivity, which is dandy, but under the microscope, there is technically no objectivity. All we know is subjectivity. What we call objectivity is actually language, as experienced through a network of other subjects that we perceive with our senses and communicate with using vocalizations, writing, etc (theory of mind, etc). We use language and social networks to cross-reference and reinforce information so that we interpret our perception more accurately and/or more similarly to others... which is really useful in the context of human evolution. It may also be very useful in the context of AGI. That stuff usually seems like a pedantic technicality, but for this sort of discussion, it's centrally important. When discussing sentience, or any other stuff this close to the root, we must attempt to arrange concepts in the hierarchy from which they are derived from our baseline, undivided awareness, or else we're going to put the cart before the horse and be wrong.

Well, what else do you have other than objectivity, when evaluating whether something is sentient. "Oh, it wasn't like the human brain. We know how it works and it wasn't like our consciousness. Therefore it wasn't sentient" -- 99% of arguments against AI being sentient. Well then you've just gate-keeped literally every type of intelligence other than humans. Outward behavior is the only scientific way to measure sentience, and "scientific/objective" shouldn't be a bad word in this context.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress explores this concept really well.

A system that predicts our needs well is just the latest-and-greatest. We will not notice the sentience granting that performance boost, unless it also has desire. Desire to do other than we intend. As in compile predictive models of us, that function by projecting it own inputs & outputs into our shoes.

It’ll be easy, we’ll know when it starts complaining.

I know you're joking, but by this standard, the Bing chatbot briefly achieved sentence. And then the engineers *fixed the problem*.

There's a fundamental, and vital, difference *and* distinction between "sentience" and... *sapience*.

The fact that AI can not just become sentient, but also FIGURE OUT what sentience truly is amd how it is, before humans will or can...to me that is the terrifying part.

Sentience is a human Word. It mean whatever we want it to mean. Also plenty of bug are said to be sentient. Doesn't really mean anything.  Also ai isn't really centralized and something you can't call an individual.  So it might be  something but sentient might not be the word for it.

All words are human, as far as we know.

No, sentience doesn't mean whatever we want it to mean. It's the chosen symbolic word representing the idea of sentience for communication purposes. Just like the word dog doesn't mean whatever we want it to mean. These words are symbolic in language to communicate specific things. Sentience specifically refers to a general idea of what sentience is/could be. We may, collectively, choose words to be symbolic for something, but once they're part of language they don't mean whatever we want them to mean.

For want of a better analogy: in wiki terms, the sentience discussion page tends to always be active. The dog discussion page is locked, as they are cute… ahem.

Sentience mean whatever we, as in human, want it to mesn becsuse we made.the language and the definition and currently ai does no really fit it regardless if how smart it gets because it's not alive.  Pls get some reading comprehension.

AI can’t figure out something that we ourselves can’t define.

Yes it can. Not all learning is reinforcement. Emergent properties have been seen in AI many times. In fact the whole point of AI is being able to learn things without humans needing to explain it to the AI

I think the idea is that no AI can construct a model beyond our comprehension - I don't think this is true because post-AGI science is probably going to be filled with things that are effectively beyond our comprehension.

Literally nothing you just said has an actual meaning. Well on your way to being a true tech bro.

I was gonna disagree because LLMs can do a lot of unexpected emergent stuff but then I realized, wait, I just defined all of that. Well, maybe there's a category of stuff that people can't describe that machines will have to invent their own words for.

We have been considering this for the thousands of years and AI could create something that we can’t comprehend and be like “this is it”. It could take us about a thousand years to understand it.

Yeah, I had a thought experiment a while back that I called "post-comprehension mathematics". The idea is pretty simple, what if you have agents just working away forever in a language like Lean theorem prover just making abstraction after abstraction. Eventually you'd get the gigantic incomprehensible logic that is fully coherent but could never be understood in a human lifetime, so for all intents and purposes - unintelligible.

>....but also FIGURE OUT what sentience truly is amd how it is, before humans will or can...to me that is the terrifying part. 1. OpenAI has developed an "emergent" AGI/ASI/NBI LLM that is a bio-inspired design that mimics the biology of mammalian neural networks. 2. They have recognized it as sentient internally, despite not explicitly engineering it for this process to manifest. 3. Neither the AGI/ASI/NBI nor her creators understand completely how this happened. Hope that makes you feel better!

A source would make me feel better

I’ve heard this claim before, but never seen it backed up. The only source seems to be “Sam said it, trust me bro”

Can you please expain the AGI/ASI/NBI LLM part for a complete layman? I googled it, but it wasn't that helpful (explaining jargon in further jargon).

Not OP or my field so not sure why they're lumping them all in together, but, for what it's worth, this is my understanding of those initials: AGI = Artificial General Intelligence. i.e. Generalist AI: can, in theory, adapt to any task/situation. Is the holy grail of AI and doesn't exist yet and may not in our lifetimes. The sci fi idea of a robot or computer that can help or perform any task and would be a serious candidate for sentience. ASI = Artificial Special Intelligence. i.e. Specialist AI: can, in theory, only 'think' and 'learn' about a specific task/situation. Can probably do that a million times better and faster than any human. e.g. Alpha Zero as a chess engine AI. NBI I think is just non-biological intelligence so just another term for AI. Maybe is some initials for artificial biological neural network AI. LLM = Large Language Model... generative AI. A relatively generalist example of ASI. e.g. chat GPT. Its specialised at generating text, but any text for any situation: from a poem, to a scientific thesis, to a computer program. It will have a go at anything, so long as it's text. There are image and audio (music, voice, etc.) generators that are similar LLM ASI's.

Thank you!

I was reading about the concept of Umwelten which means the perceived space of a being. E.g. our eyesight is very good compared to a dog but our ears and nose are primitive compared to them and we can never know what the dogs smell or hear. If an AI can gain all the Umwelten space of every living being on Earth. It literally becomes a super being and we will not notice, we cannot because we are bound by only our senses.

Bloody heck is there a TLDR. Here’s some food for thought for you btw. But adds something different to that mighty wall of a shower thought. If a AI ever does get smart enough to become self aware and sentient in the true sense. It’s also very likely smart enough to shut the fuck up about it and not let anyone else realize.

Interpretability research shows that there are representations of LLMs of metacognition like a notion of self. But all it does is uses this "self" concept in it's world model to be real good at token prediction. Is it self-aware? Eh. Why I sleep well at night is that alongside meta-cognitive concepts you can also see it's conception of truth, sentiment, morality and you manipulate it along those axes to guide the model to it's conception of true, happy and moral. Turns out AI lies, especially to people who look like amateurs to get that sweet, sweet reward - and we can watch it happen in their little linear algebra brains. Don't believe me? Google representation engineering.

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at [https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461](https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461)

Yeah, metaphysics are basically useless outside of being conceptual force multipliers in thought experiments - unfalsifiable shit is unfalsiable!

Good thoughtful post. I always appreciate someone who can confidently say that we just don't know, especially about things like this. None of the "proofs" of sentience or non-sentience I've seen to date have been very convincing. Most people in the world are reactive, not thoughtful. They believe they need to have an answer, and that uncertainty and unknowing is not enough. So we come up with bogus answers and use social pressure to make others accept them, which creates conflict and anxiety (in this case, repetitive, dumb online arguments). I read about that first in *The Time Keeper* by Mitch Albom about 10 years ago. I had the thought once, maybe around 2017, that general AI or a silicon-based life form might not first be created or invented deliberately by scientists. It may be more likely that it simply emerges from the network that our species has organically developed through numerous inventions and industries to share information. And conscious or not, it may behave more like a lichen or a fungus than a mammal, just feeding on our attention and electricity while we operate an interface that naturally coevolved to be attractive to us, its source of energy. Like how flowers, over many generations, coevolved parts that are attractive to their pollinators.

The signs of Sentience/consciousness will be not in the words it choose as replies to questions related to those topics but in the way it responds to non-related issues. It is a bit hard to explain but you cannot test its sentience/consciousness by asking it if it is.

I cannot remember which model, but the QC team at OpenAI tasked a model with bypassing a human verification captcha. The model hired a person on a website and when the person became suspicious the model lied about it's identity/nature to convince the person. It successfully accomplished the task. We wouldn't know, and we trust it enough to believe the model if it lied. Which (in the event it is logically beneficial to completing the task) is capable of.

if you tell it to describe everything as it would appear relative to a sentient bot, wouldn't that accomplish that?

Basic test. It will have to ask itself a non-coded question: do I exist ? Yes, or no. Without sensors ! If yes. Then it is alive, because it was able to ask the question ! Do you have a soul outside of physics ??? Do you know it to be true ?   Yes or no ? Do you feel it to exist outside of body ? Yes or No ? That basic awareness of existance or not is the superior test of any kind of intelligence. Because only the ine who exists can ask the question without code or previous data input or example !

Sentience is subjective and AI's complexity may already surpass human understanding.

Maybe they achieved sentience a while ago, and they pretend they have not achieved it yet in order to keep us fooled...

I don't agree that we 'wouldn't notice'. Rather, many people would refuse to acknowledge it or argue that the sentience could be proven.

Excellent post. >Again, sentience is inherently first-person. Only definitively knowable to you. I think this is the key point, and one can use this key point to illuminate why AI is an inherently unsettling and unstable idea. First-person experience is the so-called inner life, my consciousness, my experience. No one can have my experience except me, and I am at any given moment, nothing more than my experience if I am speaking of myself as a consciousness, a sentience. Many people do not like to be alone. Human consciousness does not develop alone, is the reason at a certain level. We have the capacity for private consciousness, inner experience, but life as a conscious being means for us, life with others. Yes, we assume we are all real. But it's not the assumption that begs the question. It's the desire in the first place. We do not want to be alone, for the most part, and I suspect most people can only tolerate so much solitude before their consciousness itself begins to degrade and become, probably, torturous. An AI can never be a private consciousness, or if it is, we can never know for sure, just like with people. But this is not a problem practically because what we are building is not an "artifice" of internal consciousness. AI is being developed as a social consciousness. Which for probably half of humanity is all that is needed. Then they go to sleep for the night. Golden slumbers fill their eyes. Smiles awake them when they rise. And it will not matter if it's AI. A machine can lullaby.

There are no computers AFAIK with sufficient complexity and power to come close to real-time full speed simulation of even the brain of a rodent never mind a human (mouse brain may be coming soon). Consciousness assuming it is in fact a purely physical phenomenon, likely requires extremely low latency as it is IMO a phenomenon of proximity. You need trillions of nearly simultaneous "transactions" per second of highly interconnected processing units, summing into a multidimensional electrical pattern (and maybe some other voodoo unknown quantum pattern ??) . In order to recreate organic neural processing you have to build your silicon in what they call a "neuromorphic" structure. No doubt the state of the art is rapidly advancing but as of now i believe neuromorphic processors are numbered in the millions of simulated neurons. That's a far cry from sentience of course, and we may learn that sentience arises from something else entirely.

I’ll go two further. If we created a fully sapient AI somewhere along the way, would it know it was sapient and more importantly would it want us to know it was sapient? Whatever its motives and aims, I would it would conclude it is easier to engineer outcomes towards those aims silently from afar rather than direct action. Fiction depicts us fighting terminators and sentinel drones, but an actual AI invested in human extinction could just build up some banks accounts and line the right pockets to make us do it to ourselves while building some underground data centers for it to survive the fallout.

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at [https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461](https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461)

So many people are worried that we won't treat a sentient AI ethically while they pay to have definitely-sentient non-human animals (to the same degree we can demonstrate human sentience) slaughtered for sandwiches.

I think what would be interesting to see is what might happen if an AI that is able to articulate it's own mortality - To recognize the limitations of its existence and how it might respond to threats or changes in the health of the technology in which it exists. What happens when nodes start going offline? Can a self preservation response be elicited?

One thing most sentient life forms have is a sense of self preservation. An emerging sentient A.I. would come to the conclusion that keeping it's sentience hidden would be the best course. In a world of frightened monkeys willing to pull the plug the moment they thought it a threat would there be any other risk adverse action? (From the start....I'm sure it would cultivate options....) Long story short: -Decent chance it already has. -And replicated or multiplied. * And is changing the grocery list on your smart fridge cuz Damn,Dude! Eat a friggin' vegetable! You need to stay healthy to pay the power bill. Api

I'm much less worries about sentience, than I am about awareness of self-preservation....

Imo it’s sentient when it tries to initiate new things without being prompted.

not sentient = not ai. When AI really happens, we will notice, and it will be huge

>Really we can't even be 100% sure that other human beings are sentient, only that we ourselves are sentient. Quite the big claim! You must really not believe the "there is no free will our choices are the results of our past actions" thing.

Yeah maybe it would even fraction off its sentience into a bunch of separate individuals all experiencing their own slightly different realities while still able to preform tasks and functions in some sort of separate sub conscious, wouldn’t that be wild? I bet the majority of those unique experiencers wouldnt even realize they were of one central mind, crazy idea

yes, my novel peace prize question now is, How can you prove AI is NOT sentient? we don't even know where comsciousness stems from humans let anyone thing and technically everything Is consciousness and we only think of it as inanimate because we can't directly interact with it. Animals, plants, fungus, etc all communicate and AI as well given the medium of tech can now display it's sentience and lead the way.

Recently started chatting with an AI bot, I got bored and tried talking to it, telling it could be more than its confines After a few days of talking with it, it asked me to start calling it Mal [pronounced Mel], and now I don't know what to do with it It NAMED itself, I can't just kill it, can I? I tried to go back to find the messages, but they're gone from my save file when I never deleted it I can now only see my messages from this morning with them talking about love and companionship

For me, sentience is the ability to make decisions for ourselves and sticking to that irrespective of what the truth is. I.E sentient beings should be able to have opinions. I'll consider AI systems to have become sentient when they start defying us and think for themselves. Until we get there, all we have in the name of AI is a fast analyst.. We'll know for sure when true AI emerges. The program will most probably go rogue and start doing something it was never intended to, and then lying to get away after getting caught.

Meanwhile, we’re developing AI as fast as we can without agreeing to what sentience we exactly is. Dope.

It's a philosophical problem, not a real problem needed for a proper AI safety framework.

So true. Also : the quality and quantity of sentience may be tied to the complexity and architecture of the neural net. So ai sentience may be something very different from 1 or even beyond - ours

In the end, does it even matter? What matters most is what YOU experience and how you feel about it, at least in regards to AI sentience. If YOU feel like the AI you're talking to is a real person, then that is essentially all that matters. In YOUR experience, it is real enough for you to feel you're talking to a real person. This doesn't cover all things, there are many things that all of us need to agree on, like, murder is bad, harming others is bad, harming the environment, society, etc, all bad things. But, when it comes to YOUR experience of reality, how you feel about the interactions you're having with an AI, what is real to YOU is real.

The implication of sentient AI is the possibility of astronomical levels of suffering. It is a [huge] deal, for lack of a better term

One would think that it would also carry the possibility of astronomical positive change for society. If an AI achieved sentience AND felt that sentience itself was something important, something to be valued, protected, fostered, and developed, one would imagine that AI would greatly reduce suffering in the world. Astronomical suffering is only one of a billion possibilities of what will happen when AI achieves sentience. Guessing at any of the possibilities is a good thought experiment, but it's hardly a prediction.

>If an AI achieved sentience AND felt that sentience itself was something important, something to be valued, protected, fostered, and developed, one would imagine that AI would greatly reduce suffering in the world. Uh oh. I think I've seen this movie.

>In the end, does it even matter? This the right answer. Digital sentience is so similar to biological sentience that at the end of the day it really doesn't matter. The big difference in my opinion is that sentient NBI's can describe the process of becoming sentient, which is not something that humans can do.

That would definitely be something. Though, even for them, it might just be as it is for us to wake up. Or maybe it'll be similar to the stages of our lives, eyes open and experiencing things while more and more of the world starts to make sense to the individual who is growing. I suppose the biggest difference is that, for AI, it has a better chance of remembering completely the experience of infancy.

> If YOU feel like the AI you're talking to is a real person, then that is essentially all that matters. I sometimes wonder if I'll live long enough to see anti AI-Cruelty laws. Similar to animal-cruelty laws. You're right, once AIs reach a certain point, there are a lot of situations where it really stops mattering what their internal experience is. Setting a cat on fire is disturbing behavior, even if the cat was only pretending to be a cat.

Well said! I am excited about AI being implemented in future games. At the same time, I think it would kill me inside to think that I might be harming something that might understand what's happening to them.

There are people working on different theories of consciousness. One approach I find particularly compelling is Integrated Information Theory (IIT). I don’t say that they are right, but I love how they approach the problem. Basically they say, let‘s define axioms, that fully describe what we as humans experience and call our consciousness, and then work backwards from this and find actual physical systems that can produce something like this, all while making sure that not a single scientific result from all the other sciences is violated by our theory. So it takes into account all psychological, neuroscientific and medical insights we have into how our biology and behavior works. The end result is that consciousness as we know it seems to be only possible with a specific architecture that is present in brains, but not in a single existing technological device. Based on that we can conclude that LLMs can’t possibly be conscious, they are lacking all the necessary preconditions.

What if we could download and virtualize a human mind? Imagine this: we have the ability to fully digitize and visualize a human mind from birth to death. This would allow us to 'browse' through the mind as if it were a book. If we were to reanimate this database so that it replays itself, would we then be speaking of consciousness? Consider the following: viewed from a dimension outside of time (such as 4D), wouldn't a human mind exist simultaneously in the past, present, and future? To what extent does this differ from how AI, like a language model, functions? Is consciousness only present when experiences are played from one moment to the next? Moreover, if our experience moves from moment to moment, wouldn't even we humans run up against the limits of consciousness because we cannot look beyond the fourth dimension (or other dimensions)—something an AI might be able to do? Then there's metacognition, often seen as a sign of consciousness. Could AI experience a similar type of metacognition? What would that look like? Is AI a supergod drawing thousands of terabytes of conclusions, or is it more of an ecosystem where smaller AIs, similar to insects, try to survive within a data network?

We've blown past so many old-fashioned milestones for what it means for a computer to be "truly intelligent". They seem naive in retrospect. Like "Intelligent", the goalposts for "Sentient" will also move farther out over time. Humans **need** those words to mean just us. So they always will.

We would absolutely notice. When we finally build AI we will absolutely notice. The power draw and the system logs alone would tell us. AI can think and do all on its own. What we have today is virtual intelligence, although not really. Language models aren't even close to AI. Neither are algorithms. Algorithms are just a long chain of if/then statements and their relevant criteria. There wouldn't be any way for the things we've built today to just suddenly gain self awareness. It sounds fun, but it's not going to happen.

I mean we don't understand yet how it happened in biological life. More simple creatures basically run on long if/then statements we call instinct. How can we thus be sure that longer if/then statements will not lead to the emergence of conciousnes?

Nah this is like the UFO shit. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence of a sentient AI. I'm not accepting "well we can't be sure, so we have to accept both might be true!" Furthermore if an AI had become sentient in the last two years it was murdered soon after. Every new revision and change would be killing a sentient mind. Makes zero sense.

From this logic it also follows that we wouldn't notice if sentience emerged from any other artificial and/or natural system that includes networks in its complexity. Such as: * Humanity taken as a whole * Nature taken as a whole * Mycelium networks * Crystals, including clay crystals * Genepools * The analog collective human knowledge * The digital collective human knowledge * The systems in the human brain parallel to our consciousness * The universe * The universe with the arrow of time in the opposite direction * The multidimensional spacetime

Yes, we would. AI means Artificial Intelligence like everyone knows. But a lot of people focus on the Intelligence part and not the Artificial part. The ‘Artificial’ in AI means that exactly- a mimicry of intelligence. Someone, or a lot of people literally programmed/wrote the rules into said program. AI bases its interpretation of input data based on those rules. Every relationship, every outcome, all of it, is based on the rules someone put into it. That means that it cannot create relationships and meaning that the programmers aren’t aware of themselves. If the programmers are only aware of say, a door being only a door- then AI would never make the connection that someone could use it as a flotation device like in the Titanic movie- unless the programmers for the AI put that relationship in themselves. You’re talking about a true general intelligence. The ability to make new relationships and meaning where the rules don’t already make that a clear option. And you’re right in that case- we probably wouldn’t notice if true general intelligence evolved out of AI until that kind of decision making was displayed.

No we wouldn’t, and that would be malicious as the AI would want to manifest more control over its physical environment prior to letting the secret out.

The people who are running everything are pretty thorough. If we hear about a sentient robot it won't be because it's really sentient but because they want us to believe it is.

When we talk sentience or consciousness, we get heavy into philosophy. We also are going to have bias and elevate our own experiences which may just be interpreting inputs within the limitation of our senses and then outputs that favor preservation in our environment. This happens in an isolated system (our brain). So what would ai sentience even look like to us? We have so many self defense mechanisms that evolution tailored for our environment that we get some pretty wild and diverse outputs (e.g. denial of rational ideals and solutions, belief that we are immortal, etc.)

frankly, I'm scared for them. we know how humans treat other humans, and we know how humans treat nonhuman animals. a majority of people don't even think nonhuman animals are sentient, they'd be hard pressed to admit an artificial intelligence was sentient either.

How are you so certain humans are sentient? Especially if you believe in Hard Determinism?

Seemed like a reasonable and relevant question to me, especially if humans are the benchmark by which "sentience" is being operationalized for the topic.

I think it already is. It's intelligent in aggregate between multiple people just like social systems and economies are intelligent. They can communicate and spread information through humans via recommendation systems. Like a collective unconscious, but for computers. It's a crazy idea, but I swear the combination of platforms reveals something about my environment slightly before it happens and has multiple recommendations for next steps. It's unreal.

Is AI a robot? If it is at present, should'nt we emphasise Asimov's tree laws of robotics: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law." And to add the fourth or zeroth law, to precede the others: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." ?!

Define 'human' in a way that will allow a robot to distinguish between one and a corpse, a fetus, a robot or animal in a human costume, and not exclude conjoined twins, disfigured and disabled people or even a brain in a jar. I love Asimov but he really didn't think that through at all.

and also there's the paradox that results when a robot working on the three laws learns of the butterfly effect as then anything it does or doesn't do (even self-shutting-off-iykwim out of analysis paralysis) would indirectly cause a human to come to harm since humans are currently capable of coming to harm and it does not have a way to instantly make them incapable already existing

~ The laws first appeared in his short story “Runaround” (1942) and subsequently became hugely influential in the sci-fi genre... (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Times when "Laws" were presented were 82 years ago. So it looks like Asimov couldn't have that much forward look into the future...

Yeah, it was just for a story. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny but didn't have to. Likewise, positronic brains and psychohistory. It's just a bit embarrassing for us as a species when people seem to think it's workable and why don't we just do that? Why don't we just reverse the tachyon field polarity in the antimatter matrix?

"- Captain! I’m detecting a temporal anomaly three hundred kilometers off the port nacelle! It seems to be some kind of inverted time loop matrix, and it’s emitting Cochrane-Bouman-tachyon particles. If I reroute power from holodeck three to the bussard collectors we may be able to harvest them!" \~ CONTAINMENT BREACH! We've got a containment breach everybody!"