In Star Trek the humans have an off switch too, just only Spock knows it, haha.

Jokes aside, it is essentially true that we can only prove that we’re sentient, right? That’s the whole “I think therefore I am” thing. Of course we all assume without concrete proof that everybody else is experiencing sentience like us.

In the case of fiction… I dunno, Data is canonically sentient or he isn’t, right? I guess the screenwriters know. I assume he is… they do plot lines from his point of view, so he must have one!

I always thought of sentience as something we made up to explain why we're "special" and that animals can be used as resources. I find the idea of machines having sentience to be especially outrageous because nobody ever seriously considers granting rights to animals even though it should be far less of a logical leap to declare that they would experience reality in a way similar to humans.

Within the context of star trek computers definitely can experience sentience and that obviously is the intention of the people who write those shows but i don't feel like i've ever seen it justified or put up against a serious counter-argument. At best it's a stand-in for racism so that they can tell stories that take place in the 24th century yet feel applicable to the 20th and 21st centuries. I don't think any of those episodes were ever written under the expectation that machine sentience might actually be up for debate before the actors are all dead, which is why the issue is always framed as "the final frontier of the civil rights movement" and never a serious discussion about what it means to be human.

Anyways my point is in the long run we're all going to come to despise Data and the doctor, because there's a whole generation of people primed by Star Trek reruns not to question the concept of machine rights and that's going to an inordinate amount of power to the people who are in control of them. Just imagine when somebody tries to raise the issue of voting rights, self-defense, fair distribution of resources, etc.