I will rethink my stance on the subject if (when?) video game sapient AI.
How do we test sapience? We tend not to test whether other humans have sapience
1. Sapience can't be tested. If we want to talk logical reasons, a machine even nowadays could be programmed to critique and de-construct "I think therefore I am". (Sapience is apparently more than a Turing test). There's a reason the theory of p-zombies exists today.
However more importantly sapience can't be tested for moral reasons, because at that point it will open the door to the probability that
some humans aren't sapient. I don't mean twilight zone bullshit, I mean the mentally challenged. Once there is a test for sapience, there exists a time when a doctor will say to a parent 'Sorry but due to the cerebral palsy, your child is non-sapient'.
Which opens many, many other more worrying doors.
But either way, immorality and sapience/sentience is not a hard line between 'okay' and 'not okay'. It's a sliding scale of immorality based on the actions. Killing a person is a bad act (reasons notwithstanding). Killing an animal, everyone agrees is also a bad act, but maybe not as bad an act. Then we compartmentalise those into pest animals, feed animals and pets, so we really have various gradients of bad person acts.
But nobody will disagree that any of these animals are sentient. When something is non-sentient is it also a bad act? Killing a sea cucumber? Cutting down a tree?
If they're done for no reason other than enjoyment, then it does have a certain inherent immorality. "I killed the tree for the sense of victory and achievement it gives me."
Of course that's a long way off killing some pixels, but all I'm saying is that any kind of killing probably stains your soul, just a lil'. So at that point it's down to someone's individual ethics and the line they set for themselves.
My statement was probably the weakest, since I was busily washing dishes for most of it whilst my housemates were getting punched in the head and/or having guns waved in their faces in another room.
Ho-lee shit. How did you avoid that kind of random violence? Were the other housemates better friends with the dealer or something?
Maybe kitchen guy was visible and clearly not a threat. I wonder what would have happened if you were in your room. So fucked up.
That one especially-cooked episode of Black Mirror.
Yer gonna have to be more specific.