Re:Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
by User23 on Saturday July 23, 2022 @10:42AM
(#32203755)
> because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age
All you can say is you don’t remember. Children who are too young to form reliable long term memories still form short term ones and are observably sentient from birth and by extrapolation before, albeit in a more limited fashion than adults.
This is more than a quibble, because it’s been used to justify barbaric treatment of babies with the claimed justification that they either don’t sense pain or it doesn’t matter because they won’t remember.
Re:Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
by mr_mitm on Saturday July 23, 2022 @10:51AM
(#32203839)
Surely I haven't been conscious minutes after conception. So there has to be either a phase transition or a gradual increase of consciousness. It cannot be purely a matter of not remembering.
I suspect it is not binary, because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age, and it doesn't really feel like a phase transition when waking up. Rarely, there are phases where I feel half-sentient. Which immediately leads to the question of how it can be measured, in which units, and at what point we consider someone or something "sentient". As a complete layman, I'm interested in your insight on the matter.