The Unbearable Weight of Robot Sentience

Even if an engineer thinks a machine may have a soul, it may just be in the imagination

WALL-E, the sentient trash bot on the deserted Earth. Pixar, 2008

“My battery is low and it’s getting dark,” messaged the Mars Opportunity Rover to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2019. All over the internet, people reacted emotionally to the “death” of the Mars rover.