We treat each other like crap and what we do to animals is an atrocity. So why would we play nice with robots? Maybe because social robots can be programmed to simulate love and display signifiers that force us to feel empathy. But a starving child, or unarmed people with a gun pointed at them can do the same, and they aren’t always granted mercy. So perhaps machines will require a bill of rights, especially if they are embedded with biological material that can turn vandalism into killing. The opening of “Is It Okay to Torture or Murder a Robot?” a great article by Richard Fisher of the BBC:

“Kate Darling likes to ask you to do terrible things to cute robots. At a workshop she organised this year, Darling asked people to play with a Pleo robot, a child’s toy dinosaur. The soft green Pleo has trusting eyes and affectionate movements. When you take one out of the box, it acts like a helpless newborn puppy – it can’t walk and you have to teach it about the world.

Yet after an hour allowing people to tickle and cuddle these loveable dinosaurs, Darling turned executioner. She gave the participants knives, hatchets and other weapons, and ordered them to torture and dismember their toys. What happened next ‘was much more dramatic than we ever anticipated,’ she says.

For Darling, a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, our reaction to robot cruelty is important because a new wave of machines is forcing us to reconsider our relationship with them.”