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Notes -
I recall the excellent Westworld, Season 1 (and deny that anything else came after that) that the dividing line of sentience is a mostly illusory one: that it is a emergent property of the self-concept, of the internal monologue. That notions of a soul may either be chauvinist hubris: or perhaps God will endow them with one, as Providence dictates.
Since there's no way to ascertain that any individual has consciousness from without for certain, we have to extend the benefit of the doubt to our fellow human beings. Is it possible for superintelligent AGIs, on the line of Helios from DEUS EX? Uncertain. But I am fairly certain that LLMs will reach human capacity in my lifetime, or at the very least reach a level of sociability that it will be monstrous to treat them any less than equals. If the technology stalls out at that level it will still very be much worth it: I will reserve at least 16gb of vram for my new friends.
Westworld is materialist propaganda of course. But S1 was still art because you could simply watch it as a tragedy of humans masturbating with defective robots and fooling themselves into loving them to the point that it destroys them.
But I must ask you: who has more hubris, the man who sees his own ability as unique, or the man who thinks he has the power to elevate all to his condition?
Because that story was also about that.
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Ultimately that's really the point of Turing's Imitation Game. It was not to be a real serious test to use as a measure. It illustrates that we are not even able to discern sentience in other humans, we just assume it, and that if we afford the same leeway to machines, we will eventually end up with machines that have just as good a claim to it as other humans do to us. And as early as ELIZA, once it was clear machines could manage grammar and human language, it was obvious that eventually, without even needing a real paradigm change, we'd end up with machines that would be capable of fooling us.
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