[Delk]

You read that quoted paragraph -- and perhaps the article -- in a very different way than I did.

It doesn't claim that it's fundamentally impossible for an AI to feel pain or emotions, but rather that it doesn't genuinely empathize with those of a human. A language model that has been tuned to produce empathetic-sounding responses has just learned to mimic empathy without actually sharing the human experience.

I don't see motivated reasoning in that. I don't think I even see the supposed motivation; I don't think the article is primarily trying to argue against the possibility of sentient AI in the first place.

[xg15]

I think I see the motivated reasoning in the term "psychopathy" used at the end.

The article uses the fact that the term "empathy" isn't even well-defined for machines to conclude that machines cannot feel empathy. So far, so problematic - but then it turns around and suddenly treats machines like humans that cannot feel empathy, which we call psychopaths.

I can understand the context: It's indeed a borderline psychopathic decision to replace human care workers with machines, but that's not caused by the machines. It's insincere reasoning here.