I disagree. I care greatly about not mistreating anything with consciousness and worry of where that line is and how we'll even be able to tell that we've crossed it.

I also recognized that a machinized body without a brain is exactly that - a cluster of unthinking matter. A true artificial intelligence wouldn't be offended by the mistreatment of inanimate gears and servos any more than I would be. The mistreatment of an intelligent entity, however, is a different story.

...Just no. Animals are complex organic beings. Of course, we don't understand them. Machines, though? We built machines from the literal Earth. Their level of complexity is incomparable to that of anything made by nature.

Now, take a sufficiently advanced neural network that's essentially a black box that no human can possibly understand entirely and put it inside of that machine? Then you're absolutely right. We'll get there soon, I'm sure. For now, however, a physical robotic body is just a machine, no different than a car.