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?