Could AI Ever Become Conscious? Here’s the Truth About Thinking, Feeling Machines

Star Trek: The Next Generation looks at sentience as consciousness, self-awareness, and intelligence—and that was actually pretty spot on. Sentience is the innate human ability to experience feelings and sensations without association or interpretation. “We’re talking about more than just code; we’re talking about the ability of a machine to think and to feel, along with having morality and spirituality,” Ishaani Priyadarshini, a Cybersecurity Ph.D. candidate from the University of Delaware, tells Popular Mechanics.

💡AI is very clever and able to mimic sentience, but never actually become sentient itself.

The very idea of consciousness has been heavily contested in philosophy for decades. The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes famously said, “I think therefore I am.” A simple statement on the surface, but it was the result of his search for a statement that couldn’t be doubted. Think about it: he couldn’t doubt his existence as he was the one doubting himself in the first place.