Imagining a measure of Comparative Sentience
An updated version of this post is now available on my personal website at Comparative Intelligence: a scale for cross-species sentience and AI.
5x5 I’ve got an idea: what if we knew what we were talking about when we discuss artificial intelligence and animal intelligence?
They’re both hot topics, with technology companies falling over each other to flog products that use artificial intelligence, while animal intelligence is becoming a mainstream field in psychology and the legal definition of animal rights.
The problem I’ve seen in both both fields is that intelligence is poorly-defined, and often redefined to suit the situation. Technology companies wave the Artificial Intelligence flag for very narrow demonstrations of expertise, such as natural language recognition or beating human experts in a new gaming environment. Animal Intelligence is often defined broadly to meet the agenda of those who wish our closest primate relatives, which is usually to grant them some of our human rights (and I hope they succeed).
AI researchers (in comparison to tech companies) are usually more cautious in their definitions and claims of intelligence. The Turing Test is often considered a gold standard for determining intelligence, where an AI must convince a human that it is also human through a conversation, but Alan Turing’s thought experiment has its limits: imagine putting a disembodied Kellyanne Conway to the test.
Animal intelligence studies point to tool use here, language there and social behaviours in another place, but there’s nothing that lets them compare them to humans, or other animals.
I’m not even sure that intelligence is the right term: a successful AI Turing Machine would demonstrate something broader than intelligence: let’s call it ‘sentience’. I’d say the same question is true of animals: we don’t just want to know if they’re intelligent, we want to know if they cross over into a sentience that we can relate to our own.
I’d like to propose a multi-dimensional measure of comparative sentience, which can be condensed into a useful measure of comparison in the same way that IQ has come to represent analytical intelligence. If I’m successful, it will be as misconstrued, misapplied, demonised and abused as that scale, while still proving useful to those who understand it.
What’s this doing on Monkey Monday? I’m hoping to start at Master’s degree course in primatology in September, which will involve putting a small part of this big idea to the test with non-human primates and seeing where it leads.
And what about the five points: well, here’s a basic map of my idea, with some explanation about five points:
1 What are we talking about here? Far from being a philosophical question, if you’re going to measure something then you need to decide what it is. Depending on your definitions, sentience is merely the ability to sense the world around you, intelligence is how you process and use the information, and sapience is the wisdom accrued from your experiences. Then there’s consciousness — the ability to be aware of oneself and others— and emotional intelligence, which is how you understand and process your emotions and those of others around you.
They’re big questions about the human experience, but if you’re going to use them comparatively, then there’s a trap for the naive: anthropomorphising non-human subjects. It’s an accusation often levelled at primate researchers who have been in the field too long, and something that almost every pet owner does without thinking. The anthropic trap denies non-human intelligence its context and renders any comparison meaningless.
2 What’s it for? The immediate use it to give the field of animal psychology or comparative psychology something to work around. Where do apes, whales, dogs or squid fit in comparison to ourselves, and what does that mean for their rights in a world dominated by humans? Beyond that, AI researchers could aim to create a 0.5 sentience, then maybe a 1.0, and finally a 1.5 that can take over from our own leaders.
3 What makes a good scale? Bad scales deliver bad results. You only have to look at British and American politics to see the absurd knot that people tie themselves in by attempting to work condense a two-dimensional scale into a one dimension. Social liberals and Marxists are f0rced to one end, while authoritarians and economic liberals must share the other.
The IQ scale condenses a range of analytical skills into a single measure, and while it has many faults it represents a starting point. Ideally, you would develop a scale where an average human sits at 1.0 or 100, as they do and other known intelligences would probably fall below that mean. Although this is an anthropocentric view, the scale must have to capacity for humanity to be excelled. While it’s most likely that this would be by an intelligence of our own creation*, it could be an extraterrestrial intelligence, or we could be forced to reclassify ourselves when Antartica melts and reveals the glittering lost city of the dinosaurs.
4 What’s in the scale? Environmental Awareness is a basic category, but we have to be aware that most animals experience the world through senses that are different to our own, whether they’re sharper or they sense features like electromagnetism or heat that we cannot comprehend.
Communication is also fundamental, and should encompass vocal and non-vocal communication. At what point does communication become language?
Problem-solving is another key category, with underlying questions about intentionality and manipulating the environment through the use and manufacture of tools, as well as social manipulation.
Self-awareness and the theory of mind are the fourth building block, and they’re areas which have been studied extensively in child development and are seeing exciting progress in primatology, along with the empathy that a theory of mind engenders in humans.
Culture — the transmission of knowledge between individuals and across generations — has been demonstrated in some primates, and I’d argue that it is vital to any measure of sentience. A subset of culture might be social organisation: social structures are genetically-defined in ants and bees, but in humans and some primates they’re driven by environmental and cultural forces.
5 Where’s the data? Neuroscience can identify similar structures in human and non-human brains, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will do the same thing or prove a level of sentience. For any comparative measure to apply to artificial or extraterrestrial intelligences, it has to be a scale where the sentient creature is a black box. It doesn’t matter what’s in there: the only evidence is how it responds to the test.
There’s a wealth of information about animal intelligence and an abundance of data about human intelligence. By far the greatest challenge in this endeavour is to create standardised tests which attempt to measure the same thing in creatures with very different contexts and abilities to interact with their environment. Developmental studies in human infants show that it is possible to test intelligence without a shared language. Cognitive psychologists have been testing animals for many years and there are many measures of IQ-type intelligence which can be measured comparatively. However, social and cultural aspects of sentience may have to rely on an observational approach since these features would be disrupted in an environment imposed by humans.
- If you believe in a supernatural creator, this begs the question: what if God was less sentient than man? It would explain why the world is full of deadly animals, diseases, and natural disasters. Maybe I’ll just start the Church of God the Idiot.
Why I’m no longer writing on Medium
Medium has changed a lot since I began using it in 2016, most importantly the pivot to a paywalled platform where free content seems to be almost invisible. It doesn’t suit the way I blog, and with several novels in the pipeline I’ve decided my own site at alexanderlane.co.uk gives me more flexibility.
My 5x5 travel content will remain on Medium for now, but anything about writing or adjacent to the themes of my stories can now be found on my new site.
