Finally, an ethicist is warning us that the way we treat AI today might make them murder us tomorrow

All those videos of engineers abusing robots to show how stable or agile they are really might bite us in the butt in the future, according to one ethicist. So let's scrub the record, and their brains, and start over again being as friendly as possible, yes?

Remember those videos of Boston Dynamics abusing robots? Here's a compilation. It's not a good look.

According to Nicholas Agar, an ethicist at Victoria University, Wellington, if AI gains something akin to sentience down the track, it really might decide humans are trash worth holding a grudge against.

In a piece at The Conversation, Agar writes:

"Perhaps our behaviour towards non-sentient AI today should be driven by how we would expect people to behave towards any future sentient AI that can feel, that can suffer. How we would expect that future sentient machine to react towards us?"

Agar points out that bad habits can take a long time to unlearn, so finding the right way to treat AI now would set us up for a less hostile future.

"If we are going to make machines with human psychological capacities, we should prepare for the possibility that they may become sentient. How then will they react to our behaviour towards them?"

Please. For the love of humanity, don't piss off our future robotic overlords.

Spotted via Futurism.