What Does Sentience Really Mean?
As of today, artificial intelligence can write a good-enough term paper, diagnose a patient better than many doctors can, ace a standardized test, and create an award-winning piece of digital art. It can mimic the sound of a famous person’s voice so well that the average person cannot distinguish fake from real; generate photographs of events that never happened; and act as an interlocutor so sensitive, so responsive that people find themselves falling in love.
This is only the beginning, AI developers believe. Soon AI systems might become superintelligent. Soon they might develop sentience, even will. If and when that happens, such systems need rights, argues Jacy Reese Anthis, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, a co-founder of the Sentience Institute, and an expert on how nonhuman creatures experience the world.
We spoke about the risks AI poses to humanity, the risks humanity poses to AI, and the way that humans treat nonhumans. The transcript below was condensed and edited for clarity.
Annie Lowrey: Are AI systems reasoning by themselves at this point?
Computer scientists have this bad tendency to state their intuitions about whether AI is reasoning without clarifying what they mean when they use the term first.
