If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?

In response to receiving, via email, a link to the article, If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?, I wrote the following:

For me, feeling pain and suffering does not lead to a claim to moral standing, whatever that is. The killing of fellow human beings has come to be frowned upon because of its disruption to the social order. People who are killed have families, friends, allies, etc. who will be affected negatively by their deaths, and they will likely seek to balance the scales à la Hatfields and McCoys. The institution of the state has endeavored to defuse the seeking of revenge, short-circuiting the tit-for-tat by spreading the responsibility for the execution or long-term incarceration of the perpetrator.

The reality of this situation leads many murderers to choose victims who are without family and friends and, frequently, without the protection of the law. In addition, we can see that in cases where the wholesale killing of groups will not only lead to no (foreseen) costs, but potential benefits (like in the cases of native Americans, the Kulaks, the Jews (that may have lost the war for Germany), Armenians, etc.), there is little problem in carrying out a program to achieve that end. This latter scenario generally requires a state, which is the modern method of marshalling the forces of mass killing.

When we subtract out the state, private killing is a tiny blip. Yes, horrifying when someone shoots up a high school.a music event, or a movie theater, but hardly on the scale of death and destruction of even a small conflict like we see in Yemen.

So, as I see it, killing is a trial-and-error learning process—the only process by which we can discover an "objective" (as Popper would have called it) morality. Killing animals by the millions leads to benefits, like meat on the table, while killing humans on a private scale tends to create problems. When we have a world where an Adolf Hitler or a George W. Bush cannot direct the resources of an entire nation towards the destruction of another without suffering the costs, we may have a chance as a species.

I expected my response to generate a flurry of replies, criticizing and or decrying my position, but as yet I have received none.

“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato”—Benito Mussolini

 Mussolini's fascist slogan, translated as "everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state," is the underlying theme of an article published by Mariana Mazzucato on Time Magazine's Web site as It's 2023. Here's How We Fixed the Global Economy.

This utopia, straight out of the fascist playbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, and possibly even owing an intellectual debt to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, will have its own Albert Speers bringing forth the next generation of fascist architecture. One wonders why this splendid utopia has not been brought forth in the past, as Bellamy's book projected; and why so many of the attempts to achieve heaven-on-earth have succeeded primarily in bringing hell-on-earth to the world in addition to the domestic population.

We only need to look to California, our own little laboratory of utopian social engineering, to observe the results of efforts that Mazzucato would endorse. Escalating homelessness, a failing high-speed rail project, and a power grid, due to an emphasis on renewables, that is inadequate to meet demand are just the high points for a state that is losing large numbers of businesses and citizens due to high costs, taxes, and regulations.

It leads one to wonder, who is it that really ignores empirical data? How is it that success stories like Hong Kong (created by John Cowperthwaite and described by Milton Friedman) and post-World-War-2 Germany (the German Wirtschaftswunder, heavily influenced by the economic liberal and Mont Pelerin Society member Ludwig Erhard) are ignored. And why is it that failures like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, North Korea, etc. are also ignored. At this moment, I believe it is due to our imaginations—our imaginations that make it possible to believe in a return to the Garden of Eden.