The morality of killing conscious robots

[fatdave]

Assume that sometime in the future, we will have the capacity to create robots that are able to feel emotions like love and sorrow, and think abstractly about topics like religion and politics.

Assuming that they look & feel exactly like humans, and can think exactly like humans... would it be immoral to turn one off permanently?

Alternatively, assume that we had created a virtual reality simulation (a la "The Matrix"), where the residents could feel and think just like humans and were going about their happy lives without knowing they were in a simulation. Would it be immoral to shut off their world permanently?

(Note that for the sake of this argument, we must pretend that the robots / virtual beings think and feel exactly like humans. They are exactly like humans, except they have robot DNA instead of people DNA! [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img] )