Sentient?

Was Colossus sentient?

One article I ready about the remake assumed this to be the case. The central computer in The Terminator was sentient (the dialog told us: "became self-aware on [some date]) but even this could be argued that the computer was not actually sentient but was bug ridden as was the case with Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Hal was probably not sentient. Dave Bowman said he didn't know if anyone could know but also said that Hal mimicked human behaviour which made him "appear" sentient. In 2010 it was revealed that Hal was following his programming but that the consequences of his programming were not foreseen.

One thing that Dr Chandra points out in 2010 is that computers are very literal. This is so true as anyone who has tried to program one knows. Often I hear programmers exclaim "do what I mean, not what I say."

Well, the programmers of Hal told him not to reveal to the crew of Discovery what their mission was and finally had to resort to the ultimate solution to keep the secret. Joshua, in Wargames, was programmed to play games and so it played a game.

Colossus and Guardian were programmed to prevent war. They were preventing war by controlling the perpetrators of war as they "saw" it: the human race. Any programmer knows that a single bug can cascade into an unpredictable series of disasterous consequences. Can anyone tell me that a bug in a computer that has been programmed with a litany of complex heuristic algorithms could not cascade into a series of disasterous consequences that, by our own human reckoning, could resemble sentience?

Assuming this were the case, could you say that the computer was actually sentient? I think 2001/2010 handles this argument quite nicely.

Thus, the crucial question becomes not "was Colossus sentient" but are we sentient and not, in our own biological way, malfunctioning machines?