Kant had odd views about animals, seeing them as mere things, devoid of moral value, but he insisted on their proper treatment because of the implications for how we treat one another: For he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We could surely say the same for the treatment of lifelike robots. Even if we could be certain that they werent conscious and couldnt really suffer, their torture would very likely harm the torturer and, ultimately, the other people in his life.
This may seem like an extreme version of the worry that many have about violent video games. It has long been speculated that enacting violence in a virtual world desensitizes people to violence in the real one. The evidence for such an effect turns out to be weak. In fact, as video games have become increasingly realistic, the rate of violent crime has dropped.
But the prospect of building a place like Westworld is much more troubling, because the experience of harming a host isnt merely similar to that of harming a person; its identical. We have no idea what repeatedly indulging such fantasies would do to us, ethically or psychologically but there seems little reason to think that it would be good.
I love Hopkins to pieces.
