A speculative mind

  One of my favorite songs by Pat Benatar is “Anxiety” from her album Get Nervous . Seriously, you should be listening to it while you are reading this. Not that it has anything specific to do with this blog; I just like the music. Some fantasy novels or movies are based on the premise of turning back the clock. The hero has the opportunity to go back to when they were a child or when they were in high school, returning them to the simple carefree days of their youth. If the djinn in the bottle offered the same to me, I think I would say, thanks but no thanks. I remember what those days were like, and there was nothing carefree about them. Now, I don’t want you to think I had a terrible childhood. I had good parents and siblings. I never wanted for anything important. But it seems to me, I was worried all the time. When I was a little kid, I worried about getting shots. If I was told I didn’t have to get another shot for five years, then that was the beginning of my five-year w...

  At what point will computers become sentient? At what point will they become sapient? What’s the difference? Webster’s defines sentient as “1: Responsiveness to or conscious of sense impressions. 2: Aware. 3: Finely sensitive in perception or feelings”. Webster’s defines sapient as “possessing or expressing great sagacity” (wisdom). Science fiction stories speculate about humanity meeting a sentient or a sapient species. Some stories use the two terms interchangeably, but they are quite different. A sentient species is one that is aware of their environment. They are sensitive to their surroundings and other organisms around them. As a standard, this is not high bar. There are even plants that can sense their surroundings and react accordingly. They could be called sentient. Meeting alien life that is sapient is where things get interesting. This is where things like the “Prime Directive” in Star Trek would come into play. The idea that sapient life should be allowed to ...