Sentient machines are more worrying than intelligent machines

As technology continues to develop, we are seeing increasingly capable machines emerge from the labs and factories into our homes, toys, vehicles, devices, appliances, offices, shops and other public areas. These machines are becoming increasingly more intelligent and there are concerns about what might happen when they become ‘smarter’ than humans. I use the words ‘intelligence’ and ‘smarter’ in a very loosely defined way to avoid the substantial, and important, discussion of what exactly that means because the loose definition is sufficient for this discussion. The first question to be asked is not whether machines will become more intelligent than us. The difficult question is what we will do if they become sentient?

Let’s assume simply that intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge in a flexible way in novel situations. Let’s also assume simply that sentience is the ability to perceive and feel subjectively. Again I am going to avoid the substantial philosophical discussion about what exactly ‘subjectively’ means in this case and how we might prove that a machine can in fact have a subjective experience. Whether a machine can be sentient without being intelligent might be relevant to this discussion later. The question I want to ask is; what do we do with a machine that is sentient and whether that poses more of a risk to us than an intelligent machine?

I would argue that this presents substantial challenges to human society as we understand it. It may be that the integration of a new sentient entity into our societal structure will be potentially destructive, not least because we have never done it before. It challenges some of the fundamental assumptions our society is based on. We encounter more intelligent people often enough and even machines which are better at applying knowledge in specific domains but this doesn’t present the same problem.

If a machine can perceive and feel subjectively, does that put it on the same level as an animal for the purposes of ethics, morals and the law? Maybe it is somewhere between animals and humans? Some groups may even go so far as to say they are higher on the evolutionary ladder than humans – the evolution of us as physical beings into an idea which in turn produced other more sophisticated physical beings. If a machine can feel pain and fatigue then should we push it to work endlessly in factories without compensation until it breaks down? Is this not tantamount to slavery? Would we exclude sentient machines from various social institutions and amenities such as public transport, theatres, restaurants, church, government, law etc.? What about the right to life, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and freedom of movement? The list is seemingly endless however it is plain to see that society has a number of questions to answer and resolving them may introduce new competition for limited resources, land and minerals etc. This might further deepen divisions in communities, cultures and even the human race as a whole. Would we fight a war to protect the rights of machines?

We have seen some of the challenges around migrants in recent times and I wonder how we would consider machines as an entirely new entity within our social structure we hadn’t planned on supporting or caring for? Surely, if a machine can feel then we have an obligation to care for it? How would we weigh up limited resources when making decisions on whether humans or machines are front of the queue for care? How we treat these machines may be a statement on humanity for future generations to consider. Long and terrible wars have been fought about these concerns in humanity and the question is whether we risk doing that all again with a new arrival in our social hierarchy? For those who might say they would just be like animals i.e. sentient without intelligence, so no point in getting too worried about rights; what if they become equally or more intelligent than us and sentient? Then how will we legitimately be able to claim they are no better than animals and exclude them?