Which raises a host of difficult questions. How should we treat a robot that has some degree of consciousness? What if we’re convinced that an AI program has the capacity to suffer emotionally, or to feel pain? Would shutting it off be tantamount to murder?

Robots vs. apes

An obvious comparison is to the animal rights movement. Animal rights advocates have been pushing for a reassessment of the legal status of certain animals, especially the great apes. Organizations like the Coral Springs, Florida-based Nonhuman Rights Project believe that chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans deserve to be treated as autonomous persons, rather than mere property.

Steven Wise, who leads the organization’s legal team, says that the same logic applies to any autonomous entity, living or not. If one day we have sentient robots, he says, “we should have the same sort of moral and legal responsibilities toward them that we’re in the process of developing with respect to nonhuman animals.”

Of course, deciding which machines deserve moral consideration will be tricky, because we often project human thoughts and feelings onto inanimate entities — and so end up sympathizing with entities that have no thoughts or feelings at all.

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Consider Spot, a doglike robot developed by Boston Dynamics. Earlier this year, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company released a video showing employees kicking the four-legged machine. The idea was to show off Spot’s remarkable balance. But some people saw it as akin to animal cruelty. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for example, issued a statement describing Spot’s treatment as “inappropriate.”

Kate Darling, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, observed something similar when she studied how people interact with Pleo, a toy dinosaur robot. Pleo doesn’t look lifelike — it’s obviously a toy. But it’s programmed to act and speak in ways that suggest not only a form of intelligence but also the ability to experience suffering. If you hold Pleo upside-down, it will whimper and tell you to stop.