Is it OK to torture or murder a robot?_Zhiyuan Zhang

      With the development of the AI technology, the problem of the robots' ethics will become more and more serious. Recently, Kate Darling, a researcher in MIT, did an experiment that asking people to destroy cute dinosaur toys, which were set to act like little puppy. The result of the experiment was unbelievable: people refused to destroy the cute toy though they knew that the dinosaurs were machines without emotion. In our thought, breaking a machine like microwave will not make us feel sad. However, "murdering" a high intelligence robot may be different. People seems to have some instinct not to hurt alive creature, or something like alive creature. The line that whether robot would affect human's emotion is not clear, as a result, the ethics problem of smart robot in the future will become more complicated. Whether robots should be given rights? Should they be protected or treated as tools? It is never late to think about these problems because robots are arriving.

         Darling and others robot right supports think it is difficult to tell the difference between the animals and robots in the coming future, so it is necessary give machine right and protect them.  They are right, in the future, the difference between pets (or friends) and robots may become very small, so we should set up a line to distinguish "tools" and "machine with emotion". In my opinion, the machine should be separated into two group: the AI and tradition machine. The difference is, AI can renew or update themselves by the data they get from the environment while a traditional machine can only work with the system written by human. Although the latter ones can also act like creatures if their system is strong enough to support the actions, they will never become creature and think problems like real human. But the AI is special and should be treated as real creature and given right because they grow in a similar way like creature: they evolve like us. This is why we think the robots in the movie TRANSFORMER is creatures  but not machines or tools.


http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131127-would-you-murder-a-robot