About whether we know enough about sentience to judge if AI like LaMDA is sentient.
Has this happened?
Yes 53 (42%)Not sure 22 (17%)No 52 (41%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether we know enough about sentience to judge if AI like LaMDA is sentient.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
To me, an adversarial, long Turing test in the form of a Signal (or similar) conversation is the gold standard for proving sentience. If I can send text, photos, audio, and videos off to a real person (who I don't know) and an AI agent, and not be able to tell who is who based solely off their responses, then the AI is sentient. End of story.
The existence of consciousness in other beings (humans included) is fundamentally unfalsifiable. If it can convincingly act sentient, it is sentient, because we have no other metric we can sensibly use to guage sentience with.
I believe that most discourse about machine sentience is very prone to becoming wrapped up in useless semantics. An argument over definitions of words is not a productive argument. I have yet to come across a single irrefutable reason I shouldn't believe that a Turing-test-passing robot wouldn't be sentient.