How to make a Sentient Toaster

Or the state of Artificial Consciousness

Keno Leon
10 min readSep 6, 2022

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If you are into AI and/or Technology it seems that every week there is a new and groundbreaking Neural Network architecture or AI paper, some even come with amazing demos or new startups using said tech and while all this is wonderful we still don’t have a sentient/conscious AI.

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As a researcher in the topic I believe in attacking the unknown from various angles and so this is a mostly lighthearted look at the requirements for sentience applied to the humble toaster.

Sentience vs Consciousness : Both terms are used interchangeably but there is disagreement and variety on the actual definition of either, to some sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations while consciousness is the awareness of internal and external existence but you could mix and match these terms and still have a valid (or invalid !) definition for either, these are also fairly shallow definitions but we can use them and add to them as we go along...

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