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AI Sentience: A Need to Raise the Turing-Test Bar
Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.
The question of whether artificial intelligence can ever achieve sentience came up in the news this past week. Headline news stories tell how Google fired an engineer who believed that an AI chatbot built at Google had achieved sentience.
The idea of computers and robots becoming sentient has been around for some time. More than 70 years ago Alan Turing came up with a criterion that is known as the “Turing test”: If a human converses with an AI program but cannot tell it is an AI program, then it has passed the Turing test.
The Google engineer commented about his impression of the capabilities of the chatbot, saying that “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”
The lengthy conversation between the Google engineer and the AI chatbot is indeed impressive, and arguably could be considered as sufficient proof that the AI chatbox has passed the Turing test. But Google has criticized the engineer for posting the chat transcript without authorization and they contradict his claim that the transcript is proof of AI sentience. If that’s the case, then perhaps a new set of criteria for AI sentience is needed, one that raises the bar from what was originally proposed by Turing.
In 2020, Rohit Prasad, Alexa Head Scientist at Amazon, wrote for Fast Company that “instead of obsessing about making AIs indistinguishable from humans, our ambition should be building AIs that augment human intelligence and improve our daily lives in a way that is equitable and inclusive. A worthy underlying goal is for AIs to exhibit human-like attributes of intelligence—including common sense, self-supervision, and language proficiency—and combine machine-like efficiency such as fast searches, memory recall, and accomplishing tasks on your behalf. The end result is learning and completing a variety of tasks and adapting to novel situations, far beyond what a regular person can do.”
