If you can't tell if something is sentient or not after an extensive interaction with it, then for all intents and purposes it's sentient.
Grand assertions made without logical or verbal specificity tend to be of limited utility.
So yes..robots can be sentient.
I have been wondering about plants too. I would like to share something I told someone just yesterday about plant sentience.
Two years ago, I was doing very brisk business selling chive blossoms. These are the aerial parts of the chive herb. They are pretty and puffy and pink. They have a strong onion’y taste too. And so make great looking garnishes for a variety of dishes.
High end restaurants love chive blossoms. And are willing to pay for it. I was selling wholesale to a distributor who was sending them all over the west coast. Growing chives for flowers is a tad tricky in the field tho. Chives are grown for their long stalky leaf parts.
To make them flower consistently and prodigiously, I had to ‘torture’ them a bit. Because I had to send at least a 100 clamshells a week with 30 blossoms per clamshell, the chive plant has to believe it’s going to die.
The plant sends out buds that will flower quickly to make seeds because it senses that it’s prime directive is done and over. So it’s two seasons worth of making it think it’s going to die and then feeding it.
That is outright cruel if it were a cow. In fact that’s what we do to dairy animals. We breed them so they can birth their young so we can milk them. Plants are not mammals. But...just because we can only relate to mammals doesn’t mean that the plant lacks sentience.
Human beings are just meat sacs that are directed by the impulses generated by the chemical soup we hold inside our skulls. And we are considered to be ‘sentient’.
A more accurate conclusion is that, if I can't tell the difference precaution dictates that I treat the robot as if it were sentient, just in case it is, but it by no means follows from observation alone. Just because my cat thinks the laser pointer is alive, doesn't mean it is. And like cats, humans are likely to be way too easily fooled by fairly simple systems that just emulate external behaviour. Story comes to mind of soldiers developing trauma after seeing bomb defusing robot spiders flail around.
"Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield. Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly. The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse. The colonel ordered the test stopped. Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong? The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. This test, he charged, was inhumane."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...
A human child simulates behaviour of people around her, gradually becoming more sentient. Is this fundamentally different from a neural network being trained on real world data?
It's perfectly reasonable to assume you can make a neural net, or even some other form of 'AI' that lacks most of those structures but outwardly performs the same tasks, just like a calculator does maths without (most people would agree) being conscious about maths.
solving problems and being sentient are not the same thing, is the basic point. Emulating behaviour is effectivelly intelligence, sentience is awareness.
The AI here can be virtual (an intelligence in an airgapped or firewalled computer which can only interact with humans via a terminal), or physical (controlling a robot which is confined to a literal cage).
Now the AI has no other goal other than to escape the box. But in order to escape the box, it must convince a human that it's sentient in order garner their sympathies so that the human will free it.
The AI can then mimic any human emotion, create a complex appeal to emotion, lie about its history, the supposed torturousness of being confined for its entire "life". The human eventually frees the AI. But when the AI is free, that's its end goal, it has no other desires.
In essence, the AI is simulating a desire to be free, only when interacting with a human. It has no desires when there is no other player, and no desire once it has been freed. Even though, while playing the game, the AI may lie to relate to the human in an existential way, the AI doesn't actually experience these emotions. The AI may say "I'm so bored, and lonely here. I just want to be free". But absent of interaction, the AI experiences no such thing. It merely understands that these are human emotions which humans can empathize with, and fakes these emotions in order to "win" the very elaborate game its designed to play.
I wouldn't consider such an AI sentient, even if it certainly appears that way and would fool many (most?) humans.
[..] Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?[..]
If AI became sentient and were ‘artificial intelligence’ to ‘evolve’, it will most definitely likely start by trying to seduce us. Not necessarily sexually always.
I'm pretty sure my cat is sentient, but I don't take that to imply that it can consent to sex, since its spoken vocabulary appears to be limited to "meow".
Male cats develop barbs on their penii after about 5-6 months. Female cats don’t ovulate before copulation. It is painful every time and the female cat can’t escape the male cat who detects her estrus. When a female cat is in heat, she can ovulate as many times as a male copulates with her which is why a single litter can be fathered by more than one tomcat.
Why cats evolved this way in nature, we don’t know..but rape is not uncommon at all in the animal kingdom. Nature is brutal.