Welcome to Aeon’s archive week. Every so often we like to give the spotlight to a selection of past, outstanding Aeon Essays. This time, we’re celebrating Essays that have led to successful books. Below you'll find a link to these Essays, as well as an exclusive quote from the author.

From this Essay, Jonathan Birch went on to have success with his book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI (2024).

‘Intelligence and sentience are not the same. Intelligent systems need not be sentient, and sentient systems need not be intelligent. I first got interested in the idea of artificial sentience through the OpenWorm project, an attempt to emulate the entire nervous system of a tiny worm, neuron by neuron. I thought: if we can do that, we will soon move on to emulating fruit flies, bees, fishes. Could an emulation of the brain of a sentient being itself be sentient? If so, it might achieve artificial sentience without much intelligence. Years later, we have remarkable chatbots, but they are nothing like OpenWorm. They excel at role-playing and mimicry, and so they’re able to game some of our criteria for sentience. In our essay, Kristin Andrews and I say: to find real criteria for sentience that go beyond mimicry and role-playing, we first need to understand sentience in animals.’

– Jonathan Birch

From this Essay, Katherine Harvey went on to have success with her book The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (2021).

‘“The Salacious Middle Ages” was my first serious foray into the subject of medieval sex, which I’d become interested in when researching medieval bishops who supposedly died of celibacy. But it grew into an entire book, “The Fires of Lust” (2021), which was commissioned by Reaktion after my editor there read this Aeon essay.’

– Katherine Harvey