Artificial Sentience

Artificial sentience – a subset of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – refers to sentience in machines, rather than sentience in biological organisms. While plenty of machines demonstrate intelligence, at the time of writing, there is no clear sign that any machines are sentient (i.e. have a subjective experience). At the present moment, this may sound like science fiction, but with recent advances in AI, we believe we should take the possibility of a new form of suffering entity coming into existence seriously.

We believe that, if antinatalists care to avoid bringing human beings into existence due to the inevitability of suffering, the same would apply to avoiding bringing any sentient being into existence – including potential non-biological ones. One particularly important consideration is that, if digital sentience does arise, then it may not have the limitations of biology biological organisms have, such as a gestation period, and could therefore reproduce rapidly. It’s also worrying to think, that since we have seen greater capacity for intelligence in specific fields in artificial intelligence, this may also mean that digital sentience could have a greater capacity for suffering too.

Fortunately, there are some established organisations already working on the moral consideration of digital sentience. We have included them below.