AI Sentience

Could an artificial intelligence (AI) be sentient? A recent opinion piece in the New York Times claims that AIs are not sentient.(1) The article raises an interesting question but does not adequately answer it, in part because it conflates sentience and intelligence and in part because its language is confused. There is no evidence this technology is sentient or conscious -- two words that describe an awareness of the surrounding world. This sentence is little more than a tautology, since in English "conscious" and "aware" mean the same thing.(2)