That's not true sentience though, surely? I thought true sentience meant you have to have a body, and sensory input. YOu have to have a subjective consciousness, self-awareness, and the ability to experience emotions and sensations - all AI are doing is mimicing intelligence based on algorithms to learn from huge databases of information, and information doesn't have sentience. AI has been programmed to act like it's sentient, but it's all just data sets and programming. I read one Hiver here saying AI MUST be intelligent and sentient because it said 'i feel' (along with some other things that fed his ego which he believed proved it sentient because it understood him so well - I had to laugh).

What's getting me more is institutions foregoing human intelligence in preference of the machine. What, a council worker can't whip up a bullet pointed explanation of why agapanthus is a week and what to do with it? They can't pay a local artist or photographer for the picture to go with it or hey, get one of the council workers to snap a picture on his iphone? They can complain about water resources and other waste in the same breath as powering up AI? Ugh. Maybe - probably - the machines are infinitely more intelligent, because they're better and faster at interpretting data - and sentience is irrelevant.

But goodness - give them a body, and we're fucked. Oh wait - wasn't that the subject of some sci fi or ten? Nevermind.