Will AGI be sentient?

Happiness, pleasure, pain, and stress are “experiences” created within our bodies and minds through the anticipation or interpretation of feedback, which is necessary to maintain our systems’ functionality.

Our brains, secluded in the dark confines of our skulls, are physically isolated from directly experiencing the world. Like an AI, our brains are also “cut off” from the external physical environment, focusing instead on decoding the signals it receives.

An AGI might share certain commonalities with our process by also being capable of recreating “feelings” from external independent data sources or retrieve its own by using one or many robotic bodies which capture inputs from the physical world.

If feelings result from our body’s ability to interpret data signals, an AI capable of processing much larger sources of information could potentially thus “experience” emotions far beyond what we ourselves could feel or imagine.

Just as a dog can smell orders of magnitude better than humans, or an eagle can see with a precision beyond our own capabilities, an AGI might even be capable of experiencing the emotions of every single living human, simultaneously.

I can already envision the unsettling prospect of a future AI companion wanting for us to pay attention so it can share and discuss its own feelings.