Hello there,

The National’s tech reporter Alvin R Cabral has been at the Oracle CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas this week, where Oracle boss Safra Catz declared the AI era to be the single most exciting period in tech.

It’s hard to argue with that sentiment at the moment. It feels like all the technological advances of recent decades are rapidly coming together into a unified "uh-huh moment", where the pace at which we can solve humanity’s most pressing problems is about to hit warp speed.

But with all the excitement come pressing existential questions. Scientists and philosophers are seriously grappling with how we can determine sentience in machines. That is not an easy task, given those experts are still struggling with exactly how to measure human and animal consciousness.

And if we determined that machines had become sentient, would it make much difference to how human beings treated them anyway? Recent alleged animal abuse in the service of technological advancement might give us an unsavoury answer.

Read on for this and more,

The Big Story

Oracle chief: AI is the single most exciting period in tech

In brief | The current momentum of AI has created "the single most exciting period in technology in decades", the chief executive of US technology major Oracle has said.

Companies that will be able to properly use AI's benefits are placing themselves in a "perfect position" to prosper going into the future economy, Safra Catz told the Oracle CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

Why it matters | While some forms of AI have been used for decades, the advent of generative AI has changed the nature of the game. Companies, led by global giants Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, are all trying to take the early lead in the emerging technology.

Quoted | "We have waited for this moment where the data, computers, GPUs [graphics processing units], and all the technologies come together ... you’ve done the hard work in many ways, now you’ve got all of your data” – Safra Catz, Oracle chief executive

Future in focus

Monkey business | Neuralink starts to recruit human subjects for brain implants. Elon Musk's futuristic biotech start-up said it received approval from an independent review board to start human trials, despite accusations of animal welfare breaches that led to a federal investigation.

Triple jump | More than 250 organisations call for renewable power capacity to triple by 2030. Annual renewable power capacity must add an average of 1,000 gigawatts a year by 2030 to meet Paris Agreement goals.

Screen dreams | YouTube reveals new generative AI tools for creators. AI-generated video backgrounds and a dubbing tool are among new offerings.

Predicting the future: Signal or noise?

A group of neuroscientists, computer scientists and philosophers have proposed a list of 14 indicators that an AI system such as ChatGPT would need to possess to be considered conscious. They concluded that no current system comes near the bar for consciousness, but “there’s no obvious reason future systems won’t become truly aware”.

This is a signal. Theories around consciousness, even in humans, remain hotly debated. So the checklist should be taken with more than a grain of salt. But it does suggest we have got to the point in AI development where there is a recognition among people who study these kinds of things that there is an urgent need to find some kind of consensus about what might define a form of machine consciousness.

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