I set myself a challenging task when I put this topic on my list of blog posts for 2026. Examples of presumably sentient or conscious artificial intelligences in science fiction are plentiful and varied. There are harbingers of dread and hope aplenty.
Yes, the list is long and detailed (List of fictional computers – Wikipedia) and includes benevolent and malevolent examples. It seems, at the risk of being obvious, the various authors and screen writers constructed the AI and its behavior for what was needed to tell the story or address the authors’ themes.
One of my favorite examples is The Mechanical Brain from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian Series: Swords of Mars, published in 1934. The brain was used to control a warship, and telepathically, which proved the villains undoing when the hero, John Carter, takes command and saves the girl.
(Image Credit: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/80/8a/0f/808a0fce4dbb78146fc0ca61750f0d85.jpg)
The list continues in books and films to the present where we meet Lilypad, the sentient tablet computer in Toy Story 5.
(Image Credit : https://www.laughingplace.com/disney-entertainment/toy-story-5-jessie-lilypad-clip/)
Given the variety in fictional AIs that has come before, let’s consider what might be the attributes of a sentient AI. To simplify a complex question, I settled on considering four, separate, but interrelated concepts that we can use to discuss the question: (Note: these are fairly rudimentary, accessible definitions from “googling” the word)
Sentience, which can be defined as the fundamental capacity to have subjective experiences, specifically the ability to feel pleasure, pain, or emotional tones.
Consciousness is the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings, internal thoughts, or having an “internal observer”.
Intelligence might be the most concrete/functional as defined as the computational or cognitive ability to acquire, process, learn, and apply information to solve complex tasks and adapt to new environments.
Self-awareness is the ability to reflect on one’s own mental states — to know that you are thinking, that you are feeling, and that you exist as a distinct entity.
When we think of AI or use any of the popularly available AI tools, it’s likely the intelligence attribute we encounter. We can get our questions answered, we can find information, we can have text composed, etc. But I’d bet we don’t think of Claude, for example, as being able to experience the world. Does the AI writing a review of a recipe or a restaurant feel hungry, is it horrified if it’s writing a term paper on the holocaust. In this latter instance, it might be able to summarize the horror written by human authors, but would it experience their reaction. That would imply then that these AI models are not sentient.
That brings us to consciousness. In his seminal work on the function of the hippocampus, Dr. Doug Burman (Note 1) suggests artificial intelligence and purpose-built computers, programmed to perform these functions, can regulate sensory input, thoughts, and responses to the environment, but they lack the ability to express emotional responses or create original thoughts. This would argue then that even the most sophisticated computer/AI is not conscious as humans would experience it.
Now to the question in the title of this post: Do they know they are artificial? To answer yes, this would require that the AI is self-aware, that it recognizes itself as a unique entity, separate from others and that it can “examine” its own thoughts. In our current understanding, the answer would be no, the AI lacks the emotional framework or consciousness required for self-awareness. By default, since an AI would not experience itself as a distinct entity, it would lack the awareness to know if it was artificial.
To wrap up though: could we or will we develop an AI that would emulate these four attributes and become basically an artificial human? I would suggest the better question is: Why would we? Why would we need to re-create what we already have in abundance?
To work better or faster? They don’t need to be conscious or self-aware for that. To perform tasks that are in short supply, such as care givers? It might make them easier to relate to, but they don’t need to “care about” their charges, do they?
In my next post, I’ll pick up the topic of work: Robots and Human Activities: What Will We Do with All the Free Time?
In the meantime, the question then remains: Why would we build AIs and by extension robots, that precisely emulate human behavior or abilities?
Give it some thought and let me know what you think.
Thanks for stopping by.
Note 1: Burman, Douglas D. (2023) Normal Alert Consciousness – A Central Executive Model of Hippocampal Function. http://www.intechopen.com/books/normal-alert-consciousness-a-central-executive-model-of-hippocampal-function, published by IntechOpen