Conventional wisdom has a terrible track record when it comes to judging sentience. We don’t pay the price for our errors, though, so much as non-human animals have. The only convenient barometer of sentience has always been ourselves. It’s only by analogy that we can even feel reasonably sure that other people are are sentient. From there, we’ve slowly and gradually expanded the range of beings that we feel comfortable saying are sentient, starting from those primates most like ourselves and spreading outwards towards insects and crustaceans. Not that acknowledging their sentience has done most animals any good, since we act even today as if they’re the automatons that Descartes says they are.
On the sentience of large language models
On the sentience of large language models
On the sentience of large language models
Conventional wisdom has a terrible track record when it comes to judging sentience. We don’t pay the price for our errors, though, so much as non-human animals have. The only convenient barometer of sentience has always been ourselves. It’s only by analogy that we can even feel reasonably sure that other people are are sentient. From there, we’ve slowly and gradually expanded the range of beings that we feel comfortable saying are sentient, starting from those primates most like ourselves and spreading outwards towards insects and crustaceans. Not that acknowledging their sentience has done most animals any good, since we act even today as if they’re the automatons that Descartes says they are.