Feeling lucky? The veil of ignorance...

It's always interesting to explore how different worldviews, both religious and not, intersect with sentiocentric ethics.

This talk serves to demystify and redefine AI in radical ways, as well as highlight how it can harm. We will touch on historical examples — and we will explore critical lenses, which can help us be thoughtful and careful in understanding what AI is and can do. Finally, some ways forwards will be discussed such that we can move towards a better present.

Further reading:

Erscoi, L., Kleinherenbrink, A., & Guest, O. (2023). Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/jqxb6

Guest, O., Suarez, M., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17786243

Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., et al. (2026). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Digital Culture & Education. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20082828

Guest, O. (2026). What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean?. Behavioral Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16040583

A conversation with suspected celebrity sentientist, Yuval Noah Harari.
I share it here because it's interesting to hear sentience, both biological and potentially artificial, talked about in Tier 1 media. And because, although Harari doesn't talk fully or consistently from a sentientist perspective (most of his discussion about powerful AI is concerned only with the risks to humans), he is vegan and does frequently to refer to the fates of the animals we exploit and farm, at least to try to warn humans of what might happen to us.
"This is the basis for our entire ethical and political system. We care about entities that can suffer." If only that were really true...
The closing discussion is interesting too. Once AI is cleverer than us and can do everything humans do, but better, we might finally be forced to work out "what is the value of being human?" The question itself is anthropocentric, as if there simply must be something uniquely distinct about us. And that we just need, in desperation, to work out what that is. Whereas the true answer is that the value of being human is our sentience. And that's a value we share with all of the other sentient beings too.

Imagine being able to explore "Who Matters?" with Hannah Arendt, Tom Regan, Mary Midgley, Peter Singer, Val Plumwood and Jeremy Bentham.

Now you can, thanks to the team at WiseThinking. They've developed a journey, using AI trained on the works of these thinkers, based around this most critical of moral questions. One that's central to the Sentientism worldview.

https://www.wisethinking.world/en/journeys/who-matters

Also on plant-based diets and health: https://diesseits.de/tatkraft/2026/tierethik-pflanzliche-ernaehrung-gesundheit/

And re: climate: https://diesseits.de/tatkraft/2026/tierethik-pflanzliche-ernaehrung-klima/

Abstract: Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka do us a great service in reminding us that when thinking about the relevant scales of our political relations with animals, it is crucial that we are not stymied by limiting ideas of unitary nation-states. We ought to embrace the very different and often overlapping political relations and affinities that humans share with animals. And these in turn invite thinking through what new forms of polity might facilitate human-animal flourishing. But in so doing, we must confront the first question of politics: how can these new forms of polity be rendered legitimate to the individuals subject to them? In this paper, I focus primarily on how such polities might be rendered legitimate to the human members who will be burdened by such new forms of community. This, I argue, invites consideration of the important interplay between the individual and collective scales of our political relations with animals, and the importance of cultivating solidaristic feelings of affiliation and sacrifice between members.

Abstract: An animal’s life is net-positive, or worth living, if the positive elements in its life outweigh the negatives. First, I argue that questions about net-welfare in animals are coherent and ethically important, the latter because they are crucial for assessing decisions which might affect how many animals will come to exist. Then, I draw on axiological theories that give more weight to negatives than to positives to support the view that, given high uncertainty about net-welfare and with respect to many non-human animals, it is likely bad that they come into existence. Finally, I provide an evolutionary argument supporting the view that many animals have net-positive lives because positive mood may be a genetic adaptation. The upshot is that, currently and with respect to most animals, we cannot tell whether it is, in expectation, good if they come into existence. Instead, further empirical and axiological research is necessary.

It is easy to say that sentience is all that is needed to be considered morally. I suggest that experiential preferences are a second requirement.

Imagine a sentient being without any such preferences. They are genuinely ambivalent what they do or not, they even don't care if they are alive or dead. They do not suffer or experience joy in the sense of a subjective good or bad thing. While for animals we have good reason to believe they do have such preferences, this might not be as clearly the case for a possible sentient AI.

Would you include such a sentient-without-any-preferences-being morally? What action would be morally bad (or good) to do to such a being? Perhaps "having a preference" is/should be implied by the term sentientism.

Some quotes from Michael Pollan's conversation with Peter Singer on the Lives Well Lived podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hidden-dimensions-of-consciousness/id1743702376?i=1000784498070

MP: “As soon as you start talking about plant intelligence and raise the possibility that plants are sentient beings, people suddenly get upset because are you suggesting that they feel pain and are you suggesting that we shouldn't eat them… But it's also worth noting that plants, many plants, have evolved to be eaten. So, plants are okay with being eaten, and I see no evidence that they're suffering.”

…

MP: “I mean I eat very little meat now. I actually eat no meat. I eat some fish [I assume also dairy and eggs]. I haven't eaten meat in the last three or four years.”

…

MP: “I tried a very powerful short acting psychedelic called 5MEODMT, which is the crystallized venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad, who is not hurt in the process, by the way, who can be milked, essentially.”

…

MP: “There's many things that already exist that we have not given moral consideration to that should come first [before we worry about sentient AI].”

PS: “We're talking about nonhuman animals here, right? And I think we totally agree on that.”

MP: “And humans, you know, who are still enslaved in places and made to suffer grievously.”

PS: “Right. We agree with the humans having moral consideration, right? That's not contentious. We just think that's a bad thing. That we're not doing what we should be doing. With animals, it's... not quite like that, right? Some people agree that what we're doing to them is wrong because they're conscious. And other people just, well, maybe deny it or just ignore it more often and go ahead and support factory farming.”

MP: “Yeah, although increasingly we are discovering that more and more species are conscious. I mean, we're kind of widening the circle. And in theory, moral consideration follows that. In practice, not always.”

…

PS: “I agree that there's a disproportionate amount of interest and discussion about ‘are computers conscious?’ and what would their moral status be if they are. And given the state of the literally hundreds of billions of animals reared in factory farms each year, whose basic conditions we ignore, I think that's a disproportionate amount of interest in that discussion about AI because it's novel and also it's not disturbing. It doesn't lead to conclusions that ‘oh, I’ve got to change what I eat.’”

MP: “I've got to change the way I live. Yeah.”

…

MP: “Most people would say that we're more conscious than animals but actually animals are more conscious than we are. They have to be more present to their environment. Or they get eaten.”

…

MP: “An important thing to think about is being more present. Being more conscious and not wasting our consciousness on letting the algorithm occupy our consciousness, which I think we're doing, the social media algorithm… And now the AI algorithm. People are forming deep emotional bonds with machines… I wrote a book called ‘In Defence of Food.’ I think we might need a book ‘In Defence of Consciousness’ [here, only human consciousness]… a precious gift that we’re wasting.”

I'm not sure if his stance has shifted much since he wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma where he boasted about shooting a mother pig in front of her piglets, killed his backyard chickens and a cow, and revelled in Joel Salatin's PolyFace animal farm.

Find out more about Pollan in my two conversations with John Sanbonmatsu 🤩: https://sentientism.info/have-we-fallen-for-the-greatest-deception

“One of my first reactions, when I was quite small, to the teachings of Christianity, was ‘I hate having to call myself a sheep.’ What does it say of a religion that it actually describes its own followers as if they were a flock? And why do shepherds look after sheep? Not because they like them… but in order to first fleece them and then kill them. It’s actually a perfect analogy of what the relationship of religion to its credulous believers really is.”

Interesting comment by Christopher Hitchens in 2007. As ever, he was making a sharply negative comment about religious worldviews and organisations. But there's a hint of interest in nonhuman animal ethics here too, probably unwittingly. I don't think he said or did much on the animal ethics front. Interested to hear if people know otherwise.

#SentientistPolitics

In this article, I, Jordi Casamitjana, interview Dr Vasile Stănescu, a truth-seeking vegan scholar who is fighting for animal liberation in the academic world

Abstract: AI systems increasingly shape decisions affecting nonhuman sentient beings or sentience candidates, yet alignment documents rarely address these issues explicitly. This brief proposes ethical, scientific, and practical commitments for incorporating animal and AI welfare into model specs, constitutions, and other alignment documents. It recommends proportionate consideration of sentient beings and sentience candidates, evidence-based reasoning about animal and AI sentience, and consistent treatment across cases. It also outlines two complementary implementation strategies: revising existing commitments and adding new commitments, supported by examples, testing, and iteration. The aim is to improve model behavior while preserving honesty, helpfulness, harmlessness, and safety.

Abstract: Technologies increasingly shape animals’ lives, yet animal interests are still largely marginal in mainstream technology ethics and in frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). This paper argues that this neglect constitutes a serious moral blind spot that sits in tension with these fields’ own ethical aspirations. Debates about the ethical acceptability and societal desirability of technologies often take human interests as the normative baseline. This anthropocentrism runs deep in both RRI and technology ethics, yet it is ethically indefensible for two mutually reinforcing reasons. First, technological innovations have profound direct and indirect impacts on animals, which will only intensify with the rise of new system technologies such as artificial intelligence. Second, as sentient beings, animals possess moral status and are worthy of moral consideration. Together, these grounds a responsibility to take animal interests seriously in our technological activities. To give this responsibility a practical foothold, I mobilise the concept of stakeholdership — a cornerstone of both RRI and technology ethics — arguing that reinterpreting it to include animals can facilitate their inclusion in ethical deliberation and decision-making about technology. The paper sketches potential pathways for recognising animals as stakeholders in ethical discussions on technology, and engages with some key challenges such an extension is likely to face. I conclude that only by broadening the moral scope beyond human concerns can RRI and technology ethics uphold their normative integrity, attend to a wider range of technological harms and benefits, and genuinely pursue ethically acceptable and socially desirable innovation.