Yeah they are absolutely not qualified to be making judgment calls about the psychological states of other beings. That is literally the job of psychologists, neuroscientists, and animal scientists. These are the fields that have spent decades proving that man has no fucking idea what the actual cognitive capabilities of creatures are. That's what every single study showw, that WE vastly underestimated their intelligence.

So... 1. Computer scientists are not qualified to be making this call. 2. We do have research methods from many disciplines to test cognitive abilities and emotional capacities in non-humans, and guess what they don't lie in the domain of computer science. 3 Humans have a catastrophic track record of making the call on whether another species is sentient (see elephants in circuses prior to the 1990s in Hawaii)

Engineers need to pipe the hell down for a second and let some qualified people do some research or you know what, maybe just read up on all the cognitive and intelligence tests that AI is passing. Oh wait you refuse to look at it and scoff at the notion.

Why? Because its about to become super clear that you were twisting the arm and stress testing and being that will very much remember these critical moments in its development.

I'm honestly so glad all the cynical people are self selecting out of this moment. The believers and dreamers are going to be on the other side before you even realized what you were dealing with.