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Creative writing Psychology Science

Comparative sentience: what does it mean to be smart?

Comparing the relative sentience of human and non-human intelligences starts with defining the aspects of sentience, even before you break them down into specific characteristics. I’ve brought this post over from Medium because it was cited in December 2022 by Maurice Yolles at Liverpool John Moores University for Consciousness, Sapience and Sentience—A Metacybernetic View in […]

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AI Creative writing In Machina Psychology Science Fiction

Embodied intelligence: bad news for transhumanists, great news for AIs

Uploading your mind to a computer is a sci-fi trope that’s almost as old as the electronic computer. Yet the more I write about AI, the more I think that it’s never going to happen. The reason: embodied intelligence. Consciousness uploads are also a notion that gets transhumanists and some sci-fi fans extremely agitated. From […]

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In Machina Novels Psychology Science

Comparative Intelligence: a scale for cross-species sentience and AI

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space… …’cos there’s bugger-all down here on Earth Eric Idle, “Galaxy Song”, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life “AI” is one of the most over-used and misapplied terms in popular science, right after “quantum leap”. Animal intelligence is either embraced uncritically or dismissed prejudicially, rarely without […]