[Der_Einzige]

Hahaha, no. There is no ghost in the Shell in AI powered robots and certainly not in inanimate objects. You sound like an object oriented ontology writer with this kind of post and will be treated as such because that's what you've advocated for.

The alternative is fear of hurting objects or machines everytime I act in the world. Physical objects themselves are not ethical actors. AI is not life and we are several hundred years away from being capable of creating life ourselves within an object (if it's at all possible) Your worldview would mean that if I move a machine (or rock) and it appears to "resist me", I must fear that the machine or rock doesn't want to be moved. I must believe that I have acted violently towards that object by "frustrating it's preferences".

What absurdity!

[totalZero]

Why are you linking pain and ethics? If I chop down a tree in the wintertime, I can reflect upon whether it felt pain from my chainsaw as I drag its trunk toward my house, happy to fuel my family's fireplace with its remains. If it felt pain, does that make my action less ethical than if it did not?

Is it wrong to slaughter a cow because that cow will feel pain?

Sometimes, people label ideas for the purpose of sorting and better considering them. Other times, people label ideas for the purpose of compartmentalizing them and rejecting them without really reflecting on them at all. I don't know what you mean when you say I will be "treated as such" but it sounds like a way of setting aside what I actually said in order to tussle with a preconceived, crystallized notion of something someone else said or wrote.

There are ancient cultures that believed it was wrong to do violence against a rock. Do you believe they, too, read Heidigger?