Source: Pia B/Pexels.

Sensitivity means the ability to feel. Researchers from many different disciplines are very interested in who/what is sentient and who/what is not – what I call the biodiversity of sensitivity. I like to say that sensitivity is everywhere—it’s not science fiction…and that we must be very careful about drawing lines indicating where to find it, including plants. Plenty of research supports my and others’ cautious approach and why sensitivity scaling is problematic and why sensitivity matters.¹ For these and other reasons, I was delighted to learn of Professor Jonathan Birch’s new bookThe limit of sensitivity: risk and precaution in humans, other animals and AI It is free open access. Here’s what he had to say about his revealing and deeply thoughtful, evidence-based work.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The edge of sensitivity?

Jonathan Birch: When good policy seems to depend on the sentience of an animal or a system, and we’re not sure one way or the other, what should we do? Governments around the world are grappling with a range of such challenges, problems at the “borderline of sensitivity”. How to decide whether or not to include invertebrates like octopuses, crabs and insects in animal welfare laws? How should we regulate “brain organoid” research? Could AI become sensitive and what should we do about it?

I wanted to write a book that would put these political challenges at the center. Many books on sensitivity or consciousness mention these challenges as motivation– but then put them aside and get down to business, namely proposing a speculative theory of consciousness. In my book, deciding what to do in our current state of uncertainty East the real deal. We disagree about the nature of sensitivity, and we will continue to disagree, but we need ways to reach agreement on reasonable precautions.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general interests?

JB: My first book, THE Philosophy of social evolutionfocused on the question: when can Darwinian evolution, often seen as a ruthless struggle for existence, foster forms of self-sacrifice – forms of altruism? I weighed in on controversies over the evolution of altruism in social insects, such as bees, ants, and termites. By studying the behavior of these animals, I became extremely interested in their spirits– in the way they represent the world around them. So I started to wonder: Is there something it feels like to be a bee, an ant, a termite?

Source: Oxford University Press/with permission.

These questions are incredibly difficult – we do not have a secure theory of subjective experience, nor secure experimental approaches, because this is a very young scientific field – but I believe we can provide scientific evidence to answer it. For about 10 years now, I have been trying to solidify the foundations of the emerging science of animal sentience.

MB: Who do you hope to reach in your interesting and important book?

JB: It’s a book of proposals – 26 proposals, in fact, on how we could manage our uncertainty better than we do today. Steps we can take to err on the side of caution and mitigate risks. I want to reach policy makers with these proposals, I want to reach doctors, veterinarians, biomedical researchers, technology companies, and I also want to reach the general public – I want to start a big conversation about taking seriously the risks that we have been neglected until now.

MB: What are the main topics you consider?

I’m probably best known for my work on invertebrate sentience, which is part of the book. My team’s work has led to certain invertebrates (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, crabs, lobsters, prawns) being included in the UK Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. And I was happy to see our work cited in a new law banning octopus farming. in California. But there is still much to do. I don’t want the attention given to octopuses to make us forget about insects, which are also “candidates for sentience” (as I define this term). The emerging insect farming industry needs to take welfare more seriously.

These cases led me to see that there is a whole family of cases at the “borderline of sensitivity”, and the book talks about each of them. Similar problems arise with brain organoid research. These are tiny models of human brain regions, created by inducing human stem cells to form neural tissue. In one study, these systems developed eye precursors (optic vesicles); in another study, researchers mounted one of them on an electrode array and trained it to play the video game Pong, demonstrating a measurable improvement in performance during a 20-minute session. Intuitively, there must be some ethical limit here. The more these systems resemble a human brain, the more likely it is that they can achieve some form of sensitivity.

Then there is the possibility of sentience in AI. This debate has become much more common over the past couple of years. I’ve even worked with people from tech companies on this topic, whereas previously the industry always tended to dismiss the idea of ​​artificial sentience as science fiction.

In trying to detect signs of emerging sentience in AI, we face serious problems. Octopuses may be separated from us by more than 500 million years of evolution, but we have at least one common ancestor with them, and they are evolved biological beings like us. Sensitivity in octopuses is supported by a nervous system— a system very different from ours, but still a nervous system. Testing sensitivity in a non-biological being that lacks a nervous system is a whole other challenge.

To make matters worse, some AI systems (including large language models, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) have enormous amounts of information about what humans find compelling — and they can leverage that to simulate convincingly show superficial signs of sensitivity if it serves their purposes. They can play with our criteria.

We don’t face this “game problem” with octopuses: if they check all the boxes for feeling pain, it’s probably because they feel pain, not because they have everything to gain by making us believe that they feel pain.¹

MB: Do you hope that as people learn more about sentience, they will be more willing to take it into account in how they treat humans and other animals and perhaps other entities?

JB: Of course, yes. Many of my proposals are very moderate, and deliberately so: they recommend small, inexpensive changes to our current lifestyles in order to reduce the risk of serious harm. A simple example: people should stop throwing crabs and lobsters into saucepans boiling water. However, as moderate as they are, if my proposals were all adopted, the benefits would be significant. We can change our lifestyle in small steps.