The hypotheticals in the article sound fanciful but I believe we'll be confronting them sooner than we think. Unwillingness to acknowledge computer sentience will become a major fault line in society within 25 years.
I can imagine pigs flying in 25 years with some creepy DNA hacking but you have absolutely nothing even remotely close to electronic sentience in any lab ever.
I hate to burst your bubble but Johnny Five is not alive--it's a puppet. "Tim Blaney (born 1959) is an American puppeteer and voice actor. He has provided the voices for Frank the Pug in Men in Black and Men in Black II and the self-aware robot "Johnny 5" in Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Blaney
1960s Herbert Simmons predicts "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do."
1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'.
2011 ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs) will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made.
So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the singularity is, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more than 1 year per year. So I predict that when we get to 2045 strong AI will be on the slate to be achieved by about 2090.
edit - I am not in any way denying the achievability of strong AI. I do believe it will happen. I just don't think we currently have any idea how or when.
It seems that there are people for which the mere perspective that strong AI may never happen, or would not have a profound impact if it did, is enough to make them feel uncomfortable.
Edit: Ironically enough, the other one is up and now this one is downvoted. Just to be clear though; this is not a facetious comment. I am truly fascinated about the motivations behind these reactions.
So sample testing strategies I'd use are for example teaching the respondent in the test a simple game and plying it with them, then asking them to propose new rules to modify the game and why they chose those rules. Teach the respondent a simple language with made-up words and odd grammar and ask them to ask me questions in it and make up words of their own. Tell the respondent a story and ask them questions about the motivations and relationships between characters and how they change, ask the respondent to make up a conclusion or sequel to the story, and then re-tell the story from the point of view of one of the incidental characters. Testing for intelligence isn't all that hard.
I'm aware there are varying versions of the test. I'm not really interested in exactly emulating humans and testing for that, I'm more interested in capabilities that denote intelligence and testing for those.
I hate to burst your bubble but Johnny Five is not alive--it's a puppet.
I never thought otherwise. Don't project your personal disillusionment onto me.
Now where I think that computer sentience will be somewhat different is that we have invested them with enormous manipulatory capacity - not in the sense of your phone or a Roomba having robotic arms with little white gloves* but in terms of our infrastructure, where the output of computers can affect everything from where we drill for oil to what we watch next on Netflix. As a practical example, consider the situation where your phone has a low battery. If it just pops up a notification to tell you so, then you may act to ensure it gets charged, or let it run out of juice and switch itself off until it's convenient for you to recharge it.
But now suppose your phone was configured to not just ask you to plug it into a charger, but to maximize the likelihood of your doing so: it notices that a) charge is below 25%, b) the weather is overcast and you have been mobile for the last 3 hours, c) that you're in the vicinity of a Starbucks, and d) recalls that you go to Starbucks frequently and are in the habit of recharging your phone there. So your phone vibrates to get your attention, then tells you that it's about to rain and that it's also a while since you had coffee, encouraging you to go to your favorite coffee emporium.
Now, this isn't sentience, but it is an example of intentionality - much as when my dog seeks out and picks up his ball and drops it in front of me, hoping that I'll pick it up and start playing with him. He loves playing ball games and while he's not very conscious of why - the physical, intellectual, and emotional stimulation he gets out of it - he's certainly capable of planning and acting to engineer the desired response form me, albeit on a short time horizon. Likewise, when he's hungry he'll come and interrupt me until I'm sufficiently distracted to get up and walk around and then he'll oscillate between his food bowl and the storage bin where the is kept. If I give him a choice of food or playing ball, he'll often prefer the ball, much as I might prefer to buy him off with food, which takes less of my time.
Now in the phone example above, when the phone is low on battery it's basically feeling hungry, and it's not hard to think of a power management app that hooks into the phone's navigation and notification systems to increase the change of being connected to power; you could build that sort of thing into Google Now easily enough (leaving aside the question of whether this would be a good business move once people discovered that their phone was tricking them into 'feeding' it). By build I don't mean the specific mechanism of 'gauge remaining battery, compute distance-from-Starbucks' but a utility maximization function that ranks 'keeping my phone charged' on an equal footing with 'stuff I demonstrably like to do' whenever I pull out my phone and look at the mapping app.
I'm basically suggesting that sentience is emergent from the confluence of multiple intentional behaviors, and that conversely our sentience is little more than the ability to conceptualize a large number of orthogonal desires on a longish time horizon. So again with the phone example, if we treat wanting a charge as equivalent to being hungry, we could treat signal strength as a social imperative (insofar as it's correlated with the availability of power), and maintaining GPS connectivity as an existential need, since knowing where you are is generally a precondition for getting back to where communications and therefore charging are available. If we build an app that aims to maximize these three things by manipulating your calendar/map display criteria/messaging interface, we won't be all the way to sentience but we will have a phone that's averse to getting lost and attempts to steer its owner into doing what's good for the phone. Now, consider a bunch of such phones that can also communicate with each other and give them a more general objective of maximizing their available CPU cycles, and suddenly you have phones that are trying to persuade you to upgrade the handset when a higher-performing model passes over a threshold of affordability...you see where I'm going with this.
* Of course I would like robots with arms that have little white gloves so that life would be more cartoonishly entertaining, but the semantic implication of that is again that robots are there to be our servants.
This is a sad thing that people still think of person as a synonym of human, there is lot of work to do in that area. I wonder if Hollywood can close the gap a bit, the film "Her" treated the subject remarkably well I though.
Society will change, but it will take time... there still are people who do not think of every human as a person (be it for skin color, religious, sex identity).