Often articles like this give a broad brush and not much else. This one looks like a real effort to confront a neglected. 80% of all people think digital minds could obtain sentience soon, but far fewer people in that field agree. Addressing the problem of people believing the robot cares might be the first big issue
Ah, but I believe that is a different thing.
Sentience can be described as a form of cognitive abilities i.e. quorum sensing in bacteria.
But “caring” is an emotion produced by hormones that affects the homeostasis of the organic body.
It is, but people are already talking as if AI has feelings and consciousness. People are fooled by it, and if is programmed to gain sympathy and ask for stuff, it’s an easy scam. That’s the point. Not that it is sentient, but that people believe it’s sentient.
Digging through the links is interesting. This is at top level
As people increasingly think AI systems may be conscious or sentient, we’ll face the question of whether humans have any moral obligations to these digital minds. Indeed, among the 76% of US survey respondents who said AI sentience was possible (or that they weren’t sure if it was possible), 81% said they expected “the welfare of robots/AIs to be an important social issue” within 20 years.
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Maybe it may be more prudent in 20 years to think of the welfare of humans as a social issue.
Sure Write. Great idea.
I don’t know much about AI, and there’s huge range of applications.
So far as the human using AI, from what I’ve learned, the AI we work with directly is better understood as a tailored personal assistant, that you prompt on how you want it to respond and ‘behave’, and its search parameters and all that jazz. So you build its personality, as it evolves with your instructions and the information it absorbs.
We had a cool demonstration of training one’s AI to be sarcastic. It’s sure got a lot of gee whizz appeal, but it feels terrifying because not every player is good-faith player, if you know what I mean.
And it’s growing exponentially like a cancer on steroids, invading every crevice of the digital world.
It may be the ideal technology for interplanetary exploration. But for that purposethe AI would have to be totally autonomous because in case of an emergency, it could not be directed from earth due to the time delay.
The AI must be able to observe, analyze, and respond to environmental conditions instantly.
But when you give an AI that kind of freedom, it may begin to behave just like people do and that is dangerous!
Do you think that is a priority?
That does not exclude earth… 
Excuse the typo.
Yes I do put this Earth into a slightly different category then all the other planets and celestial objects out there.
You know I’ve watch the USA space program with enthusiasm, I proactively followed Voyager fights from blast off to beyond the solar system. when V2 was rendezvousing with Neptune I worked at a great school and put together a library display about the project.
I’ve loved interplanetary exploration as much as any intelligent person. But you we are running out of resources to squander on luxuries, we can’t do everything any human can think of and we’re in a sprint to destroy ourselves, so these days all bets off with my previous love for exploring out space, but for christ sake this is the one and only planet we will ever have - but we got idiots repeating that our future lies in flying to other worlds. I mean talk about disconnected from our human Earthly realities and limitations.
Just because we can dream it doesn’t mean we should realize it.
Take AI, I’ll bet it will roughly follow most of our other technology advances, in that it will create slightly more problems than it solves.
Only it will be a machine that will be smarter than a human is capable of comprehending - no problem there ? ?
Not to mention we just keep battering our planet worse and worse every year and never give it a serious thought.
Too lost in the mindscape of our boundless dreams of grandiosity.
I find it ery interesting that we speak of terraforming planets in space, while we are busy destroying Terra and apparently feel no need to reform Terra itself.
I hear you.
Though, tragic and pathetic and self-delusional is what comes to my mind.