Daily Prompt: If There Was a Robot That was Fully Sentient and Indistinguishable From a Human, is it Alive?

pr” This prompt made me think about a novel and that is always a good sign.

So If there was a robot that was fully sentient and indistinguishable from a human, is it alive? I won’t the correct answer is but I will I believe that a robot isn’t alive because just because we are sentient doesn’t mean we are alive. There is a lot that goes into that equation. So the question becomes what is the bare minimum to be alive?

For me, being alive means being sentient, feeling pain, feeling emotions, and always growing. Even if a robot has sensors to “feel pain” it doesn’t feel think in a real sense. Because pain goes with how bad the wound is. Just by recreating something doesn’t authenticate it.

I will say robots that are sentient would be like movies. They appear to be real but are just an artificial creation. And yes, movies don’t have sentience but a movie becomes something more than just the frames we see. It captures the human experience and grows into something beyond digital data.

To bring it back to the question of why I chose it, it was because it reminded me the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep? The plot is a hunter has to hunt down six robots that have escaped from another planet and are hiding on Earth. They are robots but are sentient and pass off as humans and cannot be identified without the help of a certain machine. The protagonist goes through a lot trying to kill these robots that seem more human than some of the people he works with.

What do you think about the prompt “If there was a robot that was fully sentient and indistinguishable from a human, is it alive?”