While we debate about if and how AI will ever gain consciousness, what if everything in the universe is already sentient? The thinking dates back to the ancient Greeks and a term called panpsychism, which means "everything has a mind/soul," and it was described as some shared, animating force that made all living things alive. Bohm saw consciousness itself distributed "in" the level of individual cells, and therefrom extended "out" to a non-local expanded explicate order. Embedding consciousness in material science is music to the ears of thinkers who believe that there's no mind as something separate from the brain (dualists who oppose this thinking believe that minds exist somewhere and somehow above or beyond flesh and bone). Materialists believe that awareness of self and the world at large is produced by the function of complex biological systems, but we just don't yet know how. Then they go even further and suggest that our awareness of self is only the pretense of oversight or control since it's a product of those biological cues.

A group called The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots advocates for global treaties to stop AI from waging war without human approval. AI weapons are "grossly unethical and immoral," according to a celebrity advocate quoted in a newspaper. Unfortunately, so are any tools used to wage wars, as there's nothing ethical or moral about a sword, machine gun, or cruise missile. The decision to use them is about a lot of things, some of which can have legitimacy (like survival, freedom from fear or bondage), but weapons doing what they were designed to do have no deeper meaning than that. If the tools of war are unethical and immoral, by definition, to what higher standard should robots be held when it comes to sanctioning violence?