Suffering Robots

Via Slate:

According to Lance Gharavi, an associate professor of theater at Arizona State University, the question of free will rapidly resolves into a problem of desire. Steering the conversation into philosophical terrain, he observed that we can’t even say definitely whether humans have free will. But, he continued, if a robot has desires, even if those desires just involve the need to appropriately serve its master, then it can suffer. And if it can suffer, we have an ethical responsibility toward it. For Hartzog, on the other hand, the ethical stakes of human-like robots have more to do with the ways that we relate to humans.

Previously.