I’d posit that sentience isn’t even really necessary.
Unless sentience is necessary to suffer…
Can it suffer (regardless of whether it is self-aware of it)? Regardless of whether it’s an involuntary reflex to avoid an unpleasant sensation, one could argue that you shouldn’t cause anything to suffer if not necessary.
How do you define “suffering”? Does a sheet of steel suffer when in corrosive environment?
If so, is it wrong to let it suffer and just use a thicker sheet with allowance for the corrosion rate vs expected service life, instead of using more expensive lower-corrosion alloy?
…and that’s why philosophers aren’t welcome in engineering…
and that is how Skynet starts…
The simple answer is NO.
Show me a robot that can juggle a bowling ball, a ping-pong ball, and a raw egg. Without breaking the egg. Using <= 2 arms.
I’d be impressed then . . .
Sounds doable. Would require adjusting the arm trajectory to roughly match the initial trajectory and velocity of the object on contact, so the differential velocity at contact between the falling object and the “hand” is small enough to not break the egg; also would solve issues with the impact force of the bowling ball.
If it can juggle either objects on their own, and can recognize between them (which should be trivial), the catch and toss strategy for the given object can be chosen in real time.
Technically it should be possible to design a machine to juggle an arbitrary (sane) amount of arbitrary objects, from an egg to a car.
A robot able to juggle against a human with three balls is here.
THIS!
Sort of a silly question, when it’s these Boston Dynamics robots. They clearly have no more ‘intelligence’ than your average cockroach. They are machines. And given that they will probably be used in a military setting, they become legitimate targets (potentially, along with the company that manufactures them). …
Eventually, they may have more intelligence. When they do, is it more important to protect the ‘CPU’ than the arms and legs?
But that leads to another question. What about cyborgs? Where do you draw the line there? Ranging from people with prosthetic limbs, along a continuum, to a (future hypothetical) brain-in-a-pickle-jar controlling a robot like this? If you chop off one of the prostheses with a power tool, does it ‘hurt’ the individual? Or does it all come down to money? Or matter/energy?
Except that we do have the technology to do that, just that nobody’s bothered cobbling it together to solve that particular “problem”.
No cobbling allowed. Has to be an off-the-shelf robot 
Completely OT, but I would like to know what browser/OS/hardware combination can successfully load that entire thread without turning into a quivering pile of bits. (Or does everybody just kill off the gif animation?)
There’s a great many engineers who are pricks to their creations and I, for one, appreciate that fact because it keeps my buns intact when I’m rocketing down the tarmac at some ridiculous rate of speed. Engineers are the first level of QA…
Depends. I’d say to give it redundant legs and protect the CPU; then it can cope with loss of several limbs with only gradual loss of mission capability.
What about the pickled brain controlling the “body” over a wireless link? What about it controlling several bodies at once, swapping between them?
Depends on if you replace it afterwards. Use somebody with a “dumb” wooden leg as a model case.
Or what about a powered exoskeleton? That’s relatively close to a cyborg, when the person is strapped in; even closer if electromyography is used for control to shave off couple milliseconds from the control loop for more natural feel.
I don’t see a problem there. Bring the angle grinder.
Is there enough demand to warrant the market for this to go from lab to stores?
THAT.
You shouldn’t be nice to your creation. You should torture its ass off. Then screw it back and repeat. And repeat. And repeat until weaknesses stop appearing, then repeat a couple more times. Then xray and ultrasound the hell out of the structural parts to look for fatigue cracks, check all other subsystems for their specific wear/degradation modes, redesign if needed and torture-test again.
Whoever objects should be sentenced to using poorly tested gear. Maybe that’d be a good way to reduce the overpopulation of philosophers.
Agree, totally.
I think we have the answer to the original question: it is not OK not to torture a robot.
Skynet says : ‘No’.
Oh my, Rule 34 here “we” come!
(Plus entendre a’ trois?)
It only loads X number of posts at a time, so it seems to manage reasonably on Chrome for Android.
Loading the entire thread in one go? No mobile device that I own could handle that 
I’m not even talking mobile, any browser/OS. I can get the first few additional pages of posts but after awhile the browsers all just die, (usually well before memory is exhausted). I’ve yet to see the entire thread…
If “engineering” were really strictly defined I’d agree with you entirely. Unfortunately that word has been stepped on to include all sorts of things including systems design, programming and pickup of trash so it gets hard to talk about this with only that word.
Of course I’d hope that philosophical jackofficers are never allowed near materials science, bridge or building construction and the like. OTOH there does seem to be a need for a subset of philosophers, lets call them ethicists, in some ares of technology design and “systems engineering”.
Expanding on this would go really off topic so if you are interested please reply as new topic so I can expand on what I’m getting at.
This is one case where I really, if pedantically, wish sci-fi hadn’t long since thrown away any chance of keeping the distinction between the words “sentient” and “sapiant.”
