Just how hard is it to create a brain? Nature provides us with virtually uncountable examples of working brain hardware that enable animals to live productive lives.

In this paper, we start with what it means to be sentient and how the effect arises in natural brains, and then explore how it will arise in synthetic brains, and how synthetic sentience may be deployed in applications. Finally, we will make some predictions about how the world will change as a result.

An idea in the early 1980s led Steve Jones to think about the representation of information in the brain and deduce a surprising amount of information about it. Over 40 years later, the hardware is finally reaching the point where those thought experiments can be tested.