Financial Times | Article

The conversation about whether AI will attain or supersede human intelligence is usually framed as one of existential risk to Homo sapiens. A robot army rising up, Frankenstein-style, and turning on its creators. Now philosophers and AI researchers are asking: will these machines develop the capacity to be bored or harmed?

3 Quarks Daily | Article

It has been a busy few months in the field of animal studies. As a hobbyist follower of this area of study, every time I turn around there is a new line of research to catch up on.

Another quite prominent researcher in animal cognition and its ethical implications, Jonathan Birch, popped up in my media diet unexpectedly as a guest on Sean Carroll’s excellent “Mindscape” podcast, discussing his latest book “The Edge of Sentience”.

Shepherd | Book recommendations from Dr Jonathan Birch

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who “cares about animals,” but I came to see that I was thinking mainly about mammals and birds and overlooking the vast majority of animal life: fishes and invertebrates.

The Times | Article

We spend a lot of time worrying about how artificial intelligence will overpower humanity. But what if the real problem is the reverse?

RealClearScience | Article

The proto-eyes are what really disturbed me.

For the past decade, medical researchers have been growing living, miniature replicas of parts of the human brain from stem cells. Such brain “organoids,” as they’re called, have always raised ethical questions. But when I learned that some of them had spontaneously developed optic vesicles—that is, precursors to eyes—I realized that the closer these experiments get to a real brain, the closer we get to creating sentient beings.

The Wall Street Journal | Essay

Scientists have created brain ‘organoids’ that may be showing early signs of sentience. Should that give researchers pause?

IFL Science | Article

Sentience is a tricky concept to define, yet it has a profound importance for how we interact with other living things (and perhaps even things we should consider non-living).  

Our Hen House | Podcast

When we compare, particularly when we're talking about insect welfare or shrimp welfare, are we talking about sentience in the same, does it have the same meaning as when we're talking about cows? And if it doesn't have the same meaning, does that mean it's meaningless?

BBC | Article

"We have researchers from different fields starting to dare to ask questions about animal consciousness and explicitly think about how their research might be relevant to those questions," says Prof Birch.

NBC | Article

Nearly 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment, as a flood of research on animal cognition collides with debates over how various species ought to be treated.