Hussar
Legend
I think all this discussion about "true sentience" rather misses the point. It doesn't require an AI to be sentient for it to be incredibly disruptive. Additionally, for a lot of tasks, sentience isn't really needed. You don't need to be self-aware to drive a car, after all. Or, apparently write a story. Sure, it's fairly primitive right now, but, AI is going to get exponentially more complex over a fairly short period of time.
IOW, it's going to get to the point where it doesn't really matter if it's able to be self aware. It's going to be close enough that the question is going to be largely academic. After all, right now, AI can generate fairly complex answers to questions where it's nearly impossible to distinguish the answers from something written by a person. What does sentience really matter if that AI is capable of replacing even 10% of the workers in a field.
Many of my students are architectural engineers. That's a job that will largely disappear within their working lifetime. All those white collar jobs that were supposed to be safe from automation, as we all looked down our collective noses at factory line workers, are about to go poof.
IOW, it's going to get to the point where it doesn't really matter if it's able to be self aware. It's going to be close enough that the question is going to be largely academic. After all, right now, AI can generate fairly complex answers to questions where it's nearly impossible to distinguish the answers from something written by a person. What does sentience really matter if that AI is capable of replacing even 10% of the workers in a field.
Many of my students are architectural engineers. That's a job that will largely disappear within their working lifetime. All those white collar jobs that were supposed to be safe from automation, as we all looked down our collective noses at factory line workers, are about to go poof.