>What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?)
Nobody actually understands how "human hardware" works, so there's no valid argument that humans aren't sentient. Solipsism would argue that it's impossible to prove the sentience of any human other than yourself, but even then nobody's sentience has been disproven.
The sentience of a computer is easily disproven by its nature of being an extremely deep stack of abstractions. You can analyze it at every level and realize that ultimately it's just simple digital logic on a massive scale. There are no open questions on how the computer does the things it does. There are many open questions about how humans think.
Sentience is usually used as a means to explain humanity's position above other animals and especially as an excuse for why we treat them as resources and kill them by the billions, but it would be a lot easier to argue that animals (or even plants) have sentience than a computer program. I'm not sure why hackernews is so upset over the moral quandary of a sentient AI when probably 99% of them eat meat every day, and even the other 1% still kills bugs, lives in a house built on what used to be some sort of forest/swamp, drives a car with leather interior etc. I'm not trying to argue in favor of veganism here (and i'll even admit that this paragraph is irrelevant to the actualdebate), I'm just pointing out the absurdity of trying to ascribe sentience to a spambot but not an animal.
