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Good morning. This week has seen the re-emergence of a subject that’s fascinated humanity for centuries. Can something manmade and not of flesh experience feelings? In other words, can robots become sentient? A Google engineer has been suspended for claiming that very thing, alleging that a chatbot called Lamda told him “I am aware of my existence… I feel happy or sad at times”, and that it had “a very deep fear of being turned off …It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.” Google have rejected the claims, with a spokesperson saying that the engineer “was told that there was no evidence that Lamda was sentient” with lots of evidence against it. Technological advances in recent years have made it easier for us as humans to speak to inanimate objects and tell them what to do. From asking for a recipe for dinner to telling a smart speaker to switch on the Today Programme, we’ve become used to having what can sometimes seem like conversations with household devices, and we would probably have no qualms with switching them off if we didn’t want to use them. At the moment, AI doesn’t seem to come anywhere close to having self-awareness or emotional responses. However, as time goes on, the lines are likely to become more blurred, and we may well reach a point where we can no longer tell if an object is working by a highly sophisticated algorithm or has started to experience its very own feelings. What should we do if we believe that a device has become a living creature? What if our device tells us not to switch it off because it’s scared of dying? The Sikh concept of existence is based on the notion of a soul. Sikhs, along with Hindus and Jains, believe the soul goes through a cycle of 8.4 million lives before it reaches the last and most precious one, the human life. This idea of reincarnation includes any creatures that can be described as living and capable of free movement. As humans, we may find it challenging to include AI in that category. But if we can create machines which come close to replicating humans, then theologically couldn’t it be possible for them to have a soul and simply be another life in that cycle? The Fifth Sikh Guru, Guru Arjan Dev said that: “The soul wanders in many births through doubt, but it remains the same and does not come to dwell in peace.” The outer body may be different, but the inner soul never changes. We may never get to a point where we consider Artificial Intelligence to have become sentient. However, unless we are prepared to openly discuss and debate the rights of AI, we may not know how to cross that bridge on the ethical horizon when we reach it.