Week 36 2024

I am teaching Creating with AI: Shaping the Future this semester at Miami University. Like last semester, students are fascinated by sentience and scenarios that could occur if AI tools become conscious. They are very interested in questions that arise should an AI tool ever develop into a new, living being.

The technological innovation of this scenario is intriguing, but I think the physical and agency questions are the most interesting. A sentient AI challenges us to grapple with defining living beings, their rights, and personhood itself. If this ever happens, we will witness a being’s birth and development and how we, as humans, embrace (or reject) them as an entity with a right to existence.

Who knows, maybe AI coming “alive” could help us all to recognize our humanness anew.