Star Trek: The Next Generation looks at sentience as consciousness, self-awareness, and intelligence—and that was actually pretty spot on. Sentience is the innate human ability to experience feelings and sensations without association or interpretation. “We’re talking about more than just code; we’re talking about the ability of a machine to think and to feel, along with having morality and spirituality,” Ishaani Priyadarshini, a Cybersecurity Ph.D. candidate from the University of Delaware, tells Popular Mechanics.

AI is very clever and able to mimic sentience, but never actually become sentient itself.

The very idea of consciousness has been heavily contested in philosophy for decades. The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes famously said, “I think therefore I am.” A simple statement on the surface, but it was the result of his search for a statement that couldn’t be doubted. Think about it: he couldn’t doubt his existence as he was the one doubting himself in the first place.