Same is probably true for normal people. They wouldn't torture 'sufficiently real' characters, not for any money.
You know torture and execution used to be major forms of entertainment, right?
Yeees... though I'm not sure how 'normal' it was, it could be mainly group effects.
I can only extrapolate from a single point, and "there isn't anything I find even the tiniest bit tempting about nailing the skins of Yermy Wibble's family to a newsroom wall". Sadistically killing a 'not real' game character can be fun, but if I try to imagine doing the same to a 'sufficiently real' character, like uploaded person, then it... doesn't work.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.