Experts predict artificial intelligence will gain sentience within the next 100 years.
Some predictitll happen sooner.
Others sayitll never happen.
Still other experts say it already has happened.
Its possible the experts are just guessing.
The problem with identifying sentience and consciousness is theres no precedent when it comes to machine intelligence.
You cant just check a robots pulse or ask it to define love to see if its alive.
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Theres just one thing stopping them: the truth.
And that barriers only as strong as the consequences for breaking it.
They use terms such as human-level and strong AI to indicate theyre working towards something that imitates human intelligence.
But they usually stop short of claiming these systems are capable of experiencing thoughts and feelings.
Well, most of them anyway.
And this is not an isolated incident by any means.
Weve written aboutTwitter beefsandwacky argumentsbetween AI experts for years.
It would appear that computer scientists are no more qualified to opine on machine sentience than philosophers are.
Perhaps a machine is only sentient if it can meet a simple set of rational qualifications for sentience.
Its an animatronic puppet that uses natural language processing AI to generate phrases.
From an engineering point of view, the machine is quite impressive.
And the US governmentremains staunchin its continuing hands-off approach to AI regulation.
Unfortunately, that puts us back into the realm of scientists arguing over science.
That just leaves PR teams and the media.
On the bright side, the artificial intelligence beat is quite competitive.
Are aliens going to look like us?
What if theyre two-dimensional beings who can hide by turning sideways?
Will sentient AI take a form we can recognize?
Or is Ilya Sutskever correct and is AI already sentient?
Maybe AI is already superintelligent and it knows that coming out as alive would upset a delicate balance.
Perhaps AI will never gain sentience because its impossible to imbue computer code with the spark of life.
Maybe the best we can ever hope for is AGI.
How would you define, detect, and determine machine sentience?
Let us knowon Twitter.
