Jack

How the fuck do you torture a computer program

This is more or less what most AI welfare researchers think too!

Very true!

Yep, the virtue-ethical angle is matters here. I'm quite confident that a fly doesn't have meaningful subjective experience in any form recognizable to us, but it's still wrong to torture flies for fun.

A possibility is that they don’t have subjective experiences but still act as if they did, e.g. by killing people who have hurt them

How do you torture AI, anyway?

i encourage you to investigate your exact physical definition of subjective experience. For instance, does a dog? does a bird? does a fruit fly? what about these "anthrobots" which are non-evolutionary macro-organisms made from living human cells? scientificamerican.com/article/robots…

So many people are orders of magnitude more confident that they should be on this subject. We don't know how much sentience works, it seems one would need to possess an incredible arrogance to make strong assumptions on other types of minds.

I agree with those but would add a variant to the first one: it's also possible that some minds don't have subjective experience but still have ... something that deserves moral worth. Or if you don't want to bring in morality: what if they're just very vengeful?

I fail to see how this is not is fundamentally a religious argument and you are not still a religious person. You believe that humans are ensouled while silicon intelligences are not!