Ghost In Your Phone

Humans assign sentience to inanimate objects often

Fundamentally, I do not believe the question of proven sentience will matter much. People can and will assign sentience to things whether we prove or disprove their sentience scientifically. Our energy should be focused on giving constituents the tools to understand the new technologies with which they interact.

Research on AI home assistants, such as Alexa, and the elderly from the University of Toronto has showed that many of the participants already conferred human characteristics to the machines. Respondents interviewed spoke of Alexa being tired or upset. People’s belief can be hard to change.

However, it behooves us to vulgarize the process through which they communicate with their machines, lest they start believing they are imbued with life. It is not so obvious which is more believable to the average user: that humans have a propensity to project sentience onto objects and programs or that we have engendered sentience through technology?

-Ruby Thelot

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01740-y