Stay Sentient
Simulating consciousness isn't the same as embodying it.
Humans love to imagine machines springing to life and turning against us.
Artificial intelligence chatbots process unfathomable amounts of data in an instant, but they remain thrilling, unnerving tools in an ever-more sophisticated imitation game.
The spectacle of a machine mimicking our capacity to read and write dazzles us, but that isn’t the same as being alive.
Sentience is the conscious capacity to experience feelings and sensations. It requires processing signals from the external world (through our senses) and from within (through interoception).
AI chatbots don’t have bodies. I’m less worried about them coming to life than I am about humans becoming more mechanical, transactional, and gullible.
What worries me is that we might take the natural marvel of human consciousness for granted, neglect its cultivation, and be fooled by its likeness.
As billions of dollars are poured into making it harder to spot the absence of humanity behind the words we read, here are four ways to hold onto your sentience, feel more alive, and guard your conscience.
Become a connoisseur of sensations
A chatbot may excel at writing advertisements, coding, or scouring medical records to diagnose symptoms more efficiently and accurately.
But it will never savor a sunset, recall what cherry pie with cinnamon ice cream tastes like, or have salient childhood memories triggered by the scent of honeysuckle.
It might analyze musical data mathematically, but it will never feel the emotions a performance or a recording evokes.
Habitually focusing on sensory details sharpens your perceptions, uncovering the richness hidden in everyday moments.
Develop emotional granularity
We make sense of our lives through stories—those we tell others and ourselves. Often, we think about our feelings more than we actually feel them, eventually oversimplifying complex emotions to fit into familiar narrative structures.
Check in with the sensations and perceptions that reveal your energy and mood a few times a day—even if it means guessing at first.
Instead of trying to ‘solve’ unpleasant feelings, work on gradually being able to detect them with greater precision and less internal interference.
Get better at living with uncertainty
Humans instinctively shy away from discomfort and uncertainty. Chatbots may detect clues to our social and emotional unease, but they’ll never physically know what it feels like to ache for an unknowable answer.
But we can notice our craving for certainty several times a day. We can draw on firsthand experience—what it’s like to resist the urge to scratch an itch or to acclimate to cold water.
When we let physical and emotional sensations play out, they crest and fade. Let curiosity lead you along this challenging, endlessly fascinating, and ultimately liberating path.
Learning to live with uncertainty—more often than never—helps keep this deeply human vulnerability from being exploited by those seeking profit or power.
Make a habit of humanizing others—and yourself
ChatGPT might ace the bar exam or the SATs, but that’s child’s play compared to the true work: resisting the urge to dehumanize each other.
For centuries, our wisest ancestors have urged us to stop treating others in ways we wouldn’t want to be treated. Yet we still, consciously and unconsciously, convince ourselves that some groups deserve less.
Imagine how effortlessly AI could learn and amplify this very human tendency.
Perhaps the most important work we can do right now is to regularly remind ourselves of the basic needs we all share.
Whether you’re with a friend, a stranger, or someone whose views clash with yours, silently remind yourself: every person wants to feel safe, to thrive, and to belong.
Of all these suggestions, this one is perhaps the easiest to neglect, because we sometimes confuse acknowledging basic humanity with condoning harmful behavior.
Recognizing the difference is a rare, undervalued, but essential mark of our humanity.
Attention habits like these help us become intimately familiar with sentience itself.
Together with our other tools for embodying our values, these habits help us navigate the unintended social and ethical questions our technological innovations inevitably raise.
I’m convinced they can help each of us play our small but significant part in ensuring our species’ survival.
