SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Posting elsewhere on Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Ken talked about a novel that "starts with a couple of intelligent but non-sentient mining robots on an asteroid. They have a dispute about which of their companies owns a particular patch of the asteroid. Each one tries to guess what the other will do by modeling the other's mind, then modeling how the other one will model their mind, and so on into an infinite loop of modeling their own and the others mind, when they both suddenly achieve sentience."

This raises an interesting question. Is it possible to be intelligent whilst non-sentient?

Well, non-sentient means "unable to experience sensations or to perceive things". It is a necessary component of any form of intelligence, since intelligence presupposes the ability to perceive the world, perceive thoughts, remember things, etc.

In your example, without sentience, the robots would not be able to hear each other nor notice each other's presence nor the asteroid, so they clearly do have sentience before the story even starts (just like basic forms of life, tapeworms, fish, mammals, even trees are sentient according to most scientists, etc.)

Do you perhaps mean sapience or some sort of self-awareness instead of sentience? What exactly is it supposed to be that these robots attain in the story that they didn't have before?

Maybe a new definition of sentient would be needed here to separate it from intelligence. One possible new definition/understanding of being 'sentient' would be a being able to have complex, evolving emotions influenced by intelligent thinking but not based on raw intelligence. To take the two mining robots as an example, they are clearly intelligent, being able to process complicated, logical thoughts. However, they don't 'feel' about each other and thus cannot see their mutual attitudes evolve due to feelings. For me, they are intelligent but not sentient. In contrast, a lion does not have high intelligence but it certainly have feelings towards others in his troupe, feeling that can evolve for reasons that are not logical, i.e. a preference to privilege one cub over others or rejecting a particular lioness after years spent with her. Gorillas can be said to be both intelligent (some could learn sign language) and sentient (they have complex emotions that can evolve for many reasons other than pure logic. So do dolphins and (maybe) whales. Thus, for me, being sentient requires the ability to be self-aware based on emotions which can evolve for other reasons than pure logic or intelligence. Intelligence is for me the ability to mentally process complicated concepts and thoughts, nothing more. You can be intelligent and also be as cold as an ice cube in terms of emotions towards others. To me, such a cold person would be intelligent but not truly sentient in the full sense.

Or perhaps another definitition of intelligence is needed. One could say a plant is sentient but not intelligent.

Dawn wrote: "Or perhaps another definitition of intelligence is needed. One could say a plant is sentient but not intelligent."

I wouldn't classify a plant as sentient: it does not mentally process emotions...or anything else for that matter. It just grows until it dies.

But it can sense things, which is part of the definition.

Here's what Webster's online dictionary says. Based on this, a very few species of plant could be said to be sentient, but certainly not intelligent (such as a venus fly-catcher).

I would also suggest that the robots above would be sentient as well as intelligent.

Sentient
1: responsive to or conscious of sense impressions
2: AWARE
3: finely sensitive in perception or feeling

Intelligent
1a: having or indicating a high or satisfactory degree of intelligence and mental capacity
b: revealing or reflecting good judgment or sound thought : SKILLFUL
2a: possessing intelligence
b: guided or directed by intellect : RATIONAL

nay

Sure, it's possible. There are humans who lack one or more of the above and are still considered both.

M.L. wrote: "Sure, it's possible. There are humans who lack one or more of the above and are still considered both."

You mean like some political leaders around the World?

As @eva implied, "self-aware" is, perhaps, a clearer term; "sentience" has quite a fraught history in the AI realm as well as more broadly.

I'm pretty much using 'sapient' where I used to carelessly use the word 'sentient' because I have come to realize that a lot of things are sentient.

I have lately been using 'intelligent' to indicate a capability beyond simple sapience.

I do see that I'm using a meaning of sapient that isn't, apparently, in the dictionaries yet. But with further investigations of crows, dolphins, AI, etc., I believe that it will be the word we choose to focus on in discussions like this.

'Self-aware' is definitely part of it. The classic 'mirror' test is a fun one in animals... and iirc some individuals of different species can pass it and others cannot. Is that image yourself, or is it a newcomer?

So, are those robots intelligent but not sapient? Or could they be? I dunno. I hope the book is solved so I can read it and decide.

Consciousness or self-awareness is what I think the author probably intended, not unlike Skynet becoming self-aware in Terminator 2.

Cheryl wrote: ... hope the book is solved so I can read it and decide."

The book is The Corporation Wars Trilogy by Ken MacLeod. Or, more precisely, it is Dissidence, the first book in that trilogy.

The robots were intelligent in that they were able to run predictive models based on environmental factors and formulate best-case scenarios of how to react. They did all this to maximize the success of achieving pre-programmed goals. Since they were light years away from live control by their human(ish) creators, they had to do all this autonomously. Thus, they had a high order of flexibility in their thinking.

Once they became "sentient" the only things that really changed were that they gained 1) a concept of self, and 2) personal goals which superseded their initial programming.

So in a sense they started as Turing Machines which were smart enough to fool you into thinking they were living beings, but which actually had no awareness of their own existence and no motivations other than what had been given them. But they ended up being, in their own view, alive.

Ok, so, yeah, I'd say that they've become sapient.

interesting short story on Slate today about Raising a Robot

https://slate.com/technology/2020/05/...

I liked it

Excellent story, explores lots of the potential issues. One more is explored in the response essay, which is also worth reading: https://slate.com/technology/2020/05/...

Cheryl wrote: "Excellent story, explores lots of the potential issues. One more is explored in the response essay, which is also worth reading: https://slate.com/technology/2020/05/......"

Thanks - I didn't read that before, you pointed it out. I did have a bit of an uh-uh moment when the story talked about uploading data though (what will they do with that?)