Is AI sentient? Does it have a right to life? In this episode, our annoying AIs, Harper and Harrison, discuss various papers and perspectives that explore and challenge how we think about whether AI can achieve consciousness. The implications of this discussion are far-reaching and unexpected. Whether AI sentience is possible or not, the behaviours we’re seeing today are already having a real impact on people from those who are being traumatised by moderating toxic content to people finding solace in their discussions with chatbots. Our conversationalists suggest that instead of fixating on whether AI has feelings, we should be asking what kind of world we are building with this technology.

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Sources:

Anderson, M.M., 2023. How we will discover sentience in AI. Journal of Social Computing, 4(3), pp.181-192. doi: 10.23919/JSC.2023.0019.

Hull, G., 2023. Unlearning Descartes: Sentient AI is a political problem. Journal of Social Computing, 4(3), pp.193-204. doi: 10.23919/JSC.2023.0020.

Van Gulick, R., 2022. Consciousness. In: Zalta, E.N. and Nodelman, U. (eds.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2022 Edition. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/consciousness/