Here’s a big woolly question: How do we know when a machine is sentient?
Who decides? What’s the test?
A few days ago, a Google software engineer and artificial intelligence (AI) researcher claimed the tech company’s latest system for generating chatbots was exactly that: sentient.
Since then, leading AI researchers have dismissed this claim, saying the AI was essentially faking it.
Google’s chatbot system isn’t sentient, but one of its eventual successors may be.
When — or if the time comes, how — will we know?
What is sentience?
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher at New York University and a world-leading expert on AI and consciousness.
Ten years ago, he said he thought sentient machines would become a pressing issue “probably towards the end of the 21st century”.
“But in the past 10 years, progress in AI has been really remarkably fast, in a way that no-one predicted,” he said.
