I don't quite see why it should be contradictory. Yes, teaching imparts already existing knowledge. But on the one hand, there are not only pure fundamental lectures, but also seminars and project courses, in which new procedures are often tested or evaluated together with the students. On the other hand, no professor exclusively teaches or does research. In addition, professors have the opportunity to apply for a sabbatical, during which they have time to focus on their research.
At least at my university, it was also common for most lectures or courses to be taught by doctoral students or research assistants.
It might be helpful to view this from a scientific research perspective. UX research is more about how things should be done to provide a better usability for the user. Like, general respectively abstract concepts (e.g., how should a chatbot present itself when it first "talks" to the user, which UI components could be involved). It's not about how to actually design those things, i.e., applying CSS to an HTML document if you will. UI design is mostly a dev job, while UX design is more of an actual research discipline.
I once was spending large amounts of money on physical tech books, mostly on new programming languages or frameworks. However, I felt that by the time I was buying them they were already outdated often. Today, I usually start learning by just doing it, using the new tech and keep my way googling until I somehow become comfortable.
Maybe a quick look to Germany might help. The 9 Euro ticket was / is a great success on its own. However, the more important thing is that people are now actively talking alternatives for transportation, like cheaper / free public transport, investing and building and so on. That kind of discussion would've been unimaginable some years ago.
I think one important prerequisite for sentience is grounding, i.e. the ability to store and retrieve information, e.g., the dialog state, knowledge of the world but also individual knowledge etc. Systems that don't learn and also aren't grounded cannot be sentient as they lack the possibility to reflect on things or themselves and past conversations.
To my knowledge only humans and some species of monkeys are referred to as sentient. So I imagine insects aren't, at least when applying the general definition.
There are some discussions in this thread [0] that believe that cows and pigs are sentient.
But my point is people seem to assume sentience is a byproduct of high level intelligence, which might not be true. Maybe we need to focus more on "what is sentient", "what makes a sentient thing sentient" first and discover the basic elements of sentience.
If we can formally define sentience, or reverse-engineering sentience, or build a "MVP" or "bare-minimal" sentience. Thing would be much easier discuss.
Here are some random thoughts: Self-awareness might be a consequence of evolution - it might be more optimal to grow self-awareness than other perks to survive. Just like occasionally using reflection in programming could solve hard problems elegantly. Sentience and emotions might also be consequences of evolution - they can be seen as efficient and power tools to communicate, people can efficiently affect a lot of people with their emotion, without conveying rationally by words.
Here's a random idea: Build a complex simulation game, but with relatively simple creations with some evolving capability. If we try to manipulate the environment enough to let self-awareness and emotions to be optimal solution.
