Is it OK to torture or murder a robot? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Is it OK to torture or murder a robot? (2013)

bbc.com

3 pointsyesfitz8 comments

This article contains references to studies and talks that have only become more relevant as we continue to approach machines that appear to be alive (Large Language Models).

I agree with Kate Darling that we need to provide protections for things that appear to be alive, not for their sake, but for ours. To that end, I think I agree with Thomas Metzinger that we should stop trying to create intelligent machines. But he doesn't want to increase suffering, whereas I want to avoid even the question of distinguishing the appearance of life/suffering from some "true" life/suffering. I believe any distinction between the two will lead to a regression in the rights and moral considerations of humans and animals that have been established over the past 200+ years.

It should be forbidden to "torture" or "abuse" robots not because robots have rights but because torture and abuse also warp the torturer/abuser.

> If that’s true, then Darling questions why we have strong laws to protect some animals, but not others. Many people are happy to eat animals kept in awful conditions on industrial farms or to crush an insect under their foot, yet would be aghast at mistreatment of their next-door neighbour’s cat, or seeing a whale harvested for meat.

Humans and their laws don't always make sense, they're not even meant to balance this vs that, they often just a reflection of legislative priorities. I don't think that means we protect a robot with no feelings ....

To me that is just "this set of laws and non-laws seem illogical ... let's go with that and make more laws based on what I imagine the reasoning is between laws and non-laws".

> I don't think that means we protect a robot with no feelings ....

Pain doesn't just affect the receiver, when you die, it's your friends, family and everyone you know who is affected.

I don't think feelings should be the deciding factor.

If torture and murder itself is bad, then we should not partake in that act no matter the receiver.

Are we talking about the robot's friends, and family?

What action (or inaction) would you propose?

As I read it, your comment seems to either be an argument against creating any new laws in the existing framework, or an argument against worrying about logical justifications for new laws.

I think I'm missing what the issue is if something happens to a non feeling robot?

I don't even know what murder of a robot would be exactly, I guess Terminator style melting it down, but otherwise robots can be fixed to some extent.

Gotcha! The issue isn't what happens to the individual robot, but the impact of the action on the actor and witnesses.

To take it to the extreme: We have a perfect simulacrum of a dog that we know does not suffer, but will appear to suffer. Kicking that fake dog won't cause any danger to the fake dog, but will feel the same as kicking a real, suffering dog to the kicker and witnesses. Done enough, the kicker and witnesses will grow insensitive to the suffering of the fake dog, which is identical to the suffering of the real dog. To avoid this, we must avoid causing even the appearance of suffering.

I believe this imperative scales with the similarity of the appearance of simulated and real suffering. (Punching a rock painted with a crude smiley face is less immoral than beating up a human-like training dummy, which is less immoral than beating up a random NPC in Grand Theft Auto.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com