New Delhi, Oct. 22 -- A PhD scholar at Carnegie Mellon sought my opinion on pursuing deeper research in digital sentience a few months ago. My response was typical of a socially-concerned management consultant: "Seems to be the next frontier but not sure if it is good for human kind." I haven't changed my mind. I have only become more curious, and perhaps a little more worried.

Most CEOs I encounter seem obsessed with making artificial intelligence (AI) smarter, faster and more accurate. The next obsession may be making the AI feel smarter. The progression seems obvious: Generative AI learned to write, Agentic AI moved to act on our behalf, and frontier models are capable of reasoning, coding, using tools and operating with limited human...