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.