re: "A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?"

re: "A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?" (The New York Times, August 5, 2022)

We know that our brains take the input from our experience and compute it into perceptions of colour, cats, and angry friends, into minds that are me and perhaps even you (you say you are, but how do I know?), into emotions that evolved to serve reproductive purposes of the genes that built the brain along with the hands, eyes, ears and rest, and into our intelligence of varying degrees and everything else that human minds do. 

We do not understand it all, albeit making great strides, but we are pretty sure that there is no soul or other magical thing generating the miracle of human consciousness and all the rest of us. We and our sentience and consciousness and intelligence and emotions and the rest are all computations in our brains. 

At the moment, our brain computations are way ahead of what other species and our creations are capable of. 

It took mindless evolution more than  3 billion years to blindly evolve us, complete with a smattering of what we call intelligence and mind. But then, even insect brains greatly exceed the brain power of their mindless creator, natural selection. 

Our creations are evolving exponentially faster. One hundred years ago, computers did not exist. Where might they be in another ten years? Twenty is surely too remote to speculate.

And how exactly will we know when their computations have given rise to minds at least our equal in many ways?  How do we know that you are not a zombie brain-programmed to act all sentient and mindful? 

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/technology/ai-sentient-google.html#commentsContainer&permid=119701217:119701217