The sentence of sentience

Being sentient is not the same as being intelligent or being able to think, although it is closely related to the idea of consciousness and has been argued to be a prerequisite for real or artificial general intelligence.

Being sentient means being able to sense things about oneself and one's physical and social environment. To make a computer sentient, we just need to give it such sensors. 

Your PC, laptop or phone knows the temperature and voltage and cycle speeds of its major subsystems (what we would call organs in biology). They already communicate with each other and form networks that actually provide and analogy as well as terminology for us talking about social networks. Your phone knows where it is, and can also keep track of where the family phones are, and it can see and hear the world, and maybe recognize your face, voice and/or fingerprints.

What happens when a sensor detects that a subsystem is overheating? In medicine we call that inflammation or fever.

Some sort of alarm goes off! In medicine we call that pain: it tells the system it is not in a good state.

The system as a whole then tries to reduce the workload and stress on the subsystem concerned; or the system may flag the problem, complete high priority tasks and overrides (like ensuring your work is saved), and then shift to sleep mode or shut itself down completely. In medicine we talk about sleep and coma, and indeed doctors may induce coma until the body is sufficiently repaired.

This is the primary function of the most important sensors a system has: pain! This deals with sensing direct immediate problems as they affect the system, and forcing us to take immediate action to remove, protect or ameliorate it. The aim is to force the system to shutdown in part, while there are things that must be done, and in whole, once it is safe to sleep. When operating in a partially disabled way, it is painful to get things down. Pain like the rest of our sensory experiences is inherently subjective and takes us into the domain of qualia.

The secondary functions and sensors relate to less direct threats and longer term survival.  They might tell us we need to eat or drink or recharge. Already back in the 1960s Shakey the robot would go exploring its environment, while ensuring it could always get to a charge point to recharge.  An important function of electric vehicles is telling you where to find the nearest/next supercharger and whether you can make it. An important function of GPS apps is telling you where you can get petrol/diesel/gas - even though there are stacks of places around and it is hard to avoid finding one serendipitously.  They can also tell the driver where the humans in the vehicle can recharge.

The associations and instincts associated with second sensing might trigger fright, flight or fight reactions. They might trigger hunting instincts or the application of acquired habits and skills to obtain what we need to survive. Association learning helps us to learn about both our environment and ourselves, optimizing our skills.

Tertiary signaling functions and memory allow us to make broader more deliberate decision based on remembered pasts and predicted futures, they also allow us to exploit other members of our social grouping to extend the range of our own capabilities both in space and time. They even allows us to exploit observed serendipitous happenings and then contrive to reproduce those situations, inventing tools both concrete and abstract.

But the primary sentence of sentience is pain!

My books

My Casindra Lost stories feature an emergent AI 'Al' and a captain who is reluctantly crewed with him on a rather long journey to another galaxy - just the two of them, and some cats... There's another one, 'Alice' that emerges more gradually in the Moraturi arc.

Casindra Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B07ZB3VCW9 — tiny.cc/AmazonCL

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1696380911 justified Iowan OS

Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 978-1708810108 justified Times NR 16

Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 978-1708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18

Moraturi Lost

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B0834Z8PP8 – tiny.cc/AmazonML

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1679850080 justified Iowan OS 

Moraturi Ring

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B087PJY7G3 – tiny.cc/AmazonMR

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 979-8640426106 justified Iowan OS 

Author/Series pages and Awards

http://tiny.cc/AmazonPL & http://tiny.cc/AmazonMW

WorldCon2020 presentation (COVID-style):

http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT (downloadable talky) & http://tiny.cc/CoNZHumanTalkyPPT

New York City Book Awards 2021 (Gold and Silver): 

https://nycbookawards.spread.name/?filter=Category-%3AScience%2520Fiction,Science%2520Fiction%252F%2520Adventure 

Paradisi Chroncles Lost Mission page:

https://paradisichronicles.wordpress.com/lost-mission-series/