I'm not comfortable with "suffering"as a marker because it is already abused by animal welfare groups, but also because I think you can have a functioning sentient system without ancillary biological feedback. Being embodied doesn't have to mean building into a digital system a sense of panic if it's leg gets stuck. Visceral feedback is an evolutionary prior, and can apply to non-sentient creatures. Being sentient should depend on behavioral modification (something current ML systems can't do) vs faked emotional feedback from being touched on a sensor (which is a selling point for social robots that are far from being sentient).
I'm not comfortable with "suffering"as a marker because it is already abused by animal welfare groups, but also because I think you can have a functioning sentient system without ancillary biological feedback. Being embodied doesn't have to mean building into a digital system a sense of panic if it's leg gets stuck. Visceral feedback is an evolutionary prior, and can apply to non-sentient creatures. Being sentient should depend on behavioral modification (something current ML systems can't do) vs faked emotional feedback from being touched on a sensor (which is a selling point for social robots that are far from being sentient).