It was during a lunch eating one of my favourite cuisines, the cheeseburger, that this blog post popped into my cranium. The talks of sentience in a machine have rubbed me the wrong way. Not because it’s a false, which it is. There is no evidence that suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT house mere shreds of traits of sentience, or consciousness. While David Chalmers can publish papers on precisely what it would take for an LLM to achieve this, I’d like to explore an alternative facet on the topic of machine sentience. One that brings all sentient animals back into the limelight where they belong.
Our treatment of animals is horrific in all respects. Here are some examples of our horrid treatment of beautiful and complex animals:
Pigs, from GenV.org: Inside factory farms, these inquisitive, playful animals are given nothing at all to enrich their lives and occupy their minds. Frustrated and bored, they turn to one another and bite each other’s tails or ears, often causing lacerations and other injuries. Instead of improving conditions and easing the animals’ stress and boredom, farmers cut off their tails and clip or grind down their teeth without analgesics. These poor animals suffer severe mental anguish and then they are physically punished for it.
Dolphins, from insidehook.com: Dolphins, often young females and babies, were captured in the wild and deposited in cement pools. There, they were trained to perform tricks through a variety of methods — most often, they were deprived of food and interaction with other dolphins and confined to cramped tanks until they learned a new routine.
Chickens, from thehumanleague.org: Debeaking, or beak trimming, involves removing portions of a chicken’s beak. This procedure is done when chicks are only a few hours old, without anesthesia, and is thought to cause chronic pain throughout the bird’s life. Debeaking is designed to prevent chickens from pecking at one another—a behavior that arises due to the unnatural confinement conditions in factory farms. Layer hens are typically debeaked, although the operation can also be performed on broiler chickens.
Cows, from peta.org: Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays.3 After giving birth, they lactate for 10 months and are then inseminated again, continuing the cycle. Some spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors; others are confined to massive, crowded lots, where they are forced to live amid their own feces. A North Carolina dairy closed its doors following revelations from a whistleblower that the cows were forced to eat, walk and sleep in knee-deep waste.4 An investigation into a Pennsylvania farm that ships tons of milk for cheese production in Maryland revealed animals who were wallowing in their own manure in filthy barns with no bedding, while more than half of the cows who were being milked had leg joints that were swollen, ulcerated, or missing hair.
Elephants, from peta.org: Animals used in circuses and used for rides live a dismal life in which they are dominated, imprisoned, and violently trained. Workers routinely beat, shock, and whip them until they learn to perform meaningless, confusing tricks that have no connection to their natural instincts and behavior. Most elephants used by circuses and roadside zoos were captured in the wild and forced to leave their freedom and families behind. They will never be released to the wild.
Whales, from .influencive.com: It is believed that more than five Orcas currently at SeaWorld were kidnapped from their homes and separated from their families. Only the babies are taken from the pods, causing huge amounts of distress for the mother, father and child. Many whales are also killed in the process and once captured, they are confined to small concrete tanks. Most of the Orcas at SeaWorld were captured in Iceland and travelled hundreds of thousands of miles in small tanks, covered in lanolin to help them survive outside the water.
Had enough? The point I am making is that for all other animals besides humans, we have little to no respect. This is because, for some reason, no matter how many studies are conducted and reported on we still find it hard to believe that other animals besides human beings can display and experience a range of complex emotions. This is the basis of sentience, technically defined as ‘the ability to feel or perceive the world around you and as a result have subjective experiences.’
Here are a few examples of how intelligent and sentient (even sapient!) animals are, in case you didn’t know:
From blogs.ubc.ca: Dolphins have cognitive traits that can be compared to humans that are rarely found in the animal kingdom; traits such as sentience, which is the ability to perceive or feel emotion and self-awareness, which is to think about one’s own mental thoughts and can identify themselves. Dolphins have been known to recognize themselves when given the chance to look at a mirror, gazing at and amusing themselves by acting playful while watching the mirror.
From worldanimalprotection.ca: Pigs have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving abilities, spatial memory, and an aptitude for learning complex tasks. They possess an excellent long-term memory and are quick to learn from both positive and negative experiences. Studies have shown that pigs can navigate mazes, distinguish between different objects, and even play simple video games with commendable accuracy!
From baanchangelephantpark.com: A recent study observed Asian elephants comforting one another when distressed. The elephants in the study used both physical contact and vocal sounds as forms of comfort, stroking one another with their trunks and emitting small chirps. The study concluded this behavior is “best classified with similar consolation responses by apes, possibly based on convergent evolution of empathic capacities.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not something we can be ignorant of any longer. Animals feel things, they respond to the way they are treated. Imagine keeping someone in a cage for their entire life. Indeed, stories of this nature exist, and are shocking, cruel, terrifying and heart-breaking. We wish the perpetrators the worst punishments imaginable. Yet, after hearing those stories, we take our children to the zoo, and afterwards make a stop at McDonalds and Walmart, companies that are known for funding factory-farming. This is an underlying hypocrisy that we must do away with.
Especially when machine sentience comes into the picture. Here’s where the real blog post starts: if we, even for a second, understand the reasons for machine rights, we MUST use this same logic and apply the SAME rights to animals. The evidence is clear, and it doesn’t seem likely that any social push for animal rights will create enough of a ruckus to close down zoos and halt factory-farms across the world. However, a new technosocial intersection could be just the thing we need to fully realize animal rights, once and for all.
Sentience is a simple concept, really. Again, if a machine can feel or perceive the world around them and have subjective experience, they are, by default, sentient.
If a machine can have sentience, we realize that machines with sentience need rights to be protected. Basic rights — for humans — include: the right to live free from torture, the right to live free from slavery, the right to own property, the right to equality and dignity, and the right to live free from all forms of discrimination. If a machine can have rights, why not an animal?
The problem lies with money, as always. Animals are tasty. We need to eat them to survive. 99% of farmed animals live on factory-farms, enduring the conditions listed above (and more and worse). Billions of sentient beings are abused, cut, raped, tortured, packaged, and sold so we can sustain our diets. Attempting to give animals rights, regardless of sentience, means that hundreds of billions of dollars that create, maintain, and expand these industries grinds to a halt. This is no easy task.
Not that machines getting rights, or acquiring sentience for that matter, is an easy task. It just puts our ironies into perspective. We are extremely speciesist. Put another way, we lack compassion for any non-human being.
Might this lack of care extend to machines? Likely. After all, most depictions of utopia-avec-robots is basically a different flavour of slavery, just with robots instead of oppressed humans. In fact, robot as a neologism literally meant “forced labour.” So it makes sense in some twisted way why we have no respect for animals, sentience or not.
Sure, major points have been left out. Financially-strained folks cannot afford the ethical butchers and so McDonalds and such are necessary for their cheap cuts of meat. Machines rights are not that similar to animal rights since machines would (in theory) act more similar to human agents rather than autonomous grazers. And on and on. Tangents can be explored in other blog posts. The final point is to reiterate the whole: animals deserve rights before machines, but absolutely with machines.
Excuse me while I finish my (ethical) cheeseburger.