Racism is bad because it makes us form groups and mistreat people that are different from us.

Doesn't mistreatment suppose there is some correct form of treatment, and wouldn't a racist believe they are using the correct treatment?

That is, I don't think this sentence is getting to the heart of why/if/when racism is bad. Your following sentence is closer but still not there- oftentimes, increasing differences between people is a winning move, not a stupid one.

If there's an ethical issue with killing simulations there's an ethical issue with killing AIs.

Doesn't follow, for several reasons:

• If the issue is with the termination of subjective experiences, and if we assume that that people-simulations have qualia (let's grant it for the sake of argument) it still doesn't follow that every optimization algorithm of sufficient calculational power also has qualia.
• If the ethical issue is with violation of individuals' rights, there's nothing to prevent us from constructing only AIs that are only too happy to consent to be deleted; or indeed which strongly desire to be deleted eventually -- but most people-simulation would presumably not want to die, since most people don't want to die.

That's fine for the most part, but in that case do you really feel that same empathy for these proposed simulations?

Yes.

If all you care about is humans maybe you shouldn't care about these simulations being killed anyway. They're less like us than animals, they have no flesh and weren't born of a mother, why do you care about them just because they make a false imitation of our thoughts?

Because I do - and I don't want to change. (This is the same justification that I have for caring about humans, or myself.)

More importantly though I wasn't talking about human-centrism as a moral issue but a logical one.

It is the logical problem that I reject. There is no inconsistency in being averse to racism but not averse to speciesism.

Racism is bad because it makes us form groups and mistreat people that are different from us.

I suspect the causation goes the other way. I am looking for a study I recently read about that suggested this.

White subjects had difficulty recalling the specific content of what individual black actors in videos had said relative to how well they recalled what individual white actors had said. When videos of black actors were of them arguing for opposite sides of an issue, the subjects were able to match content to speakers equally well for black and white actors. The theory is that race was used as a proxy for group membership until something better came along. Once people were grouped by ideas, the black speakers were thought of as individuals.

The evolutionary story behind this is that people evolved with group politics being important, but almost never seeing someone of noticeably different race. It makes sense that we evolved mechanisms for dealing with groups in general and none for race in particular. It makes sense that in absence of anything better, we might group by appearance, and it makes sense that we would err to perceive irrelevant patterns/groups as the cost of never or rarely missing relevant patterns/groups.

Ok, forget the poor analogy with racism, why racism is bad is a whole separate issue that I had no intention to get into. Let me try and just explain my point better.

Human-centrism is a bias in thinking which makes us assume things like "The earth is the centre of the universe", "Only humans have consciousness" and "Morality extends to things approximately as far as they seem like humans". I personally think it is only through this bias that we would worry about the possible future murder of human simulations before we worry about the possible future murder of the AIs intelligent enough to simulate a human in the first place

Human-centrism as fighting for our tribe and choosing not to respect the rights of AIs is a different issue. Choosing not to respect the rights of AIs is different from failing to appreciate the potential existence of those rights.

They're less like us than animals, they have no flesh and weren't born of a mother, why do you care about them just because they make a false imitation of our thoughts?

Because in a information theoretic sense they may be more similar to my mind than the minds of most animals.