[Seminar Announcement] AI Sentience

Seminar

Speaker: Prof. Simon Goldstein

Associate professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong

Title: AI Sentience

Date: 15:30 – 17:30 pm, Monday, March 31, 2025

Venue: Conference Room 302, Department of Philosophy, ShuiYuan Campus, National Taiwan University (18, SiYuan Street, Taipei)

Abstract: 

This talk investigates the possibility of AI sentience, the ability of AIs to feel pain and pleasure. We'll start by surveying leading philosophical theories of pain and pleasure.  Then we'll use these theories to offer an explanation of pain and pleasure in terms of a special kind of information processing. Roughly, a system feels pain and pleasure when it has internal states that evolved to track homeostatic imbalances in affordances and resources that are important to the system's functioning. These imbalances must reliably cause the internal states, and the internal states must reliably cause these imbalances to be corrected. The talk goes on to lay out the conditions under which AIs would develop this distinctive kind of information processing.