Artificial sentience (sometimes called digital sentience or machine sentience) is the capacity for subjective experience instantiated in artificial minds, such as arising from artificial general intelligence or whole brain emulation.

Evaluation

80,000 Hours rates artificial sentience a “potential highest priority area”: an issue that, if more thoroughly examined, could rank as a top global challenge.^[1]

Further reading

Harris, Jamie & Jacy Reese Anthis (2021) The moral consideration of artificial entities: a literature review, Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 27.

Long, Robert (2022) Key questions about artificial sentience: an opinionated guide, Experience Machines, April 25.

Shulman, Carl & Nick Bostrom (2021) Sharing the world with digital minds, in Steven Clarke, Hazem Zohny & Julian Savulescu (eds.) Rethinking Moral Status, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 306–326.

Related entries

Center for Reducing Suffering | ethics of artificial intelligence | long-term future | mind crime | moral circle expansion | moral patienthood | non-humans and the long-term future | whole brain emulation

1. ^

   80,000 Hours (2022) Our current list of pressing world problems, 80,000 Hours.