Would we owe it anything?
On the axis: Can a machine think · a thinking machine
If a machine thought, would it have interests, a dignity, rights, or would it remain a thing we dispose of, owing it nothing?
Justification
If the sole title to enter the calculus is to be able to feel pleasure and pain, then the boundary of moral consideration must follow sentience, not reason or language. Bentham thus turns back both the Cartesian argument of the animal-machine and the one that once excluded the slave: it is not the faculty of reasoning or talking that grounds a claim to consideration, but the capacity to suffer. The conclusion follows from the consistency of the utilitarian criterion itself: consideration extends to every sentient being, placing him in pathocentrism and making him a precursor of the animal cause.
The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII, §1, footnote (the suffering of animals)
Justification
Turing judges the question "can a machine think?" too dependent on the use of words to be settled, and replaces it with a test, the : an interrogator converses blind with a human and a machine; if they can no longer tell them apart, there is no longer a reason to refuse to one what is granted to the other. To the objection that the machine would still lack consciousness of what it says, he answers that pressing it leads to solipsism: I know others think only by their behaviour, and refusing that same evidence to machines alone is arbitrary. The substrate therefore matters little, a universal machine being able to simulate any discrete-state machine.
The original question, "Can machines think?", I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion."Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind (1950)
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind (1950)
leads to: Moral circle (Can a machine count morally?)