Engineering Sentience
This work addresses the foundational challenge of designing sentient machines, which is incremental as it builds on existing philosophical and computational concepts without presenting new empirical results.
The paper tackles the problem of defining sentience for AI in functional, computational terms to enable implementation, proposing that it requires sensory signals to be both assertoric and qualitative, and sketches potential implementation approaches with current technology.
We spell out a definition of sentience that may be useful for designing and building it in machines. We propose that for sentience to be meaningful for AI, it must be fleshed out in functional, computational terms, in enough detail to allow for implementation. Yet, this notion of sentience must also reflect something essentially 'subjective', beyond just having the general capacity to encode perceptual content. For this specific functional notion of sentience to occur, we propose that certain sensory signals need to be both assertoric (persistent) and qualitative. To illustrate the definition in more concrete terms, we sketch out some ways for potential implementation, given current technology. Understanding what it takes for artificial agents to be functionally sentient can also help us avoid creating them inadvertently, or at least, realize that we have created them in a timely manner.