You have to accept that in the real world a dog's life is objectively worth less to humans than a human life.
If that were not true, then it would be generally accepted that saving a dog would take priority over a child, whereas the reverse is true.
I'm not advocating for mistreating dogs, I'm advocating for distinguishing between how we would like the world to be and how the world really is.
> What would a dog answer
To me it's interesting that they chose to give a dog the ability to answer. Certainly the ability to speak like a human would factor in 'how much like humans they are'. It's a way of humanizing the dog, which introduces bias, making the dog more human than it really is.
There is no need to pretend dogs are almost people to justify treating them well.
Anyway, different sorts of things having different values is why so many people are concerned about powerful non-human entities with inhuman motivations (AIs generally, and corporations particularly.) It's also the reason people are afraid of hungry bears (the bear cares more about itself than you.)
The value judgement could simply come from the fact that we need to preserve our own species, and if we need to sacrifice some small percentage of dogs to do so, than this is perfectly reasonable. We can still exhibit empathy by accepting that this situation is not ideal and striving to reduce that percentage down to 0, maybe by inventing substitutes.
As for the machines example, I would expect the machines to place higher value on their own life than on human life, precisely because they would be objectively superior, which is why I would not let machines exist without any restrictions, even if the machines would be a more useful dominant species.
Machines experience no pleasure or pain and thus there is zero utility gained/lost by destroying them. Dogs and humans do; it's bad to kill or torture them.
Throwing a dog in front of a train (or killing/torturing it for research) to save a child depends on how likely it is that it will work, and how many QALYs the dog and child have left.
A stranger's life is also worth less than my daughter's life. A million strangers?
If I had to press a button to choose between my daughter or all the strangers on HN and their dogs, I would press it and wouldn't even blink.
If it were a stranger's daughter, though, I'd probably ask some questions about the daughter, and if I can't determine that there's something about her that would be worth a million strangers, she would have the same value as an average stranger, so I would opt to save a million strangers.
If I had to choose between a stranger and all dogs on Earth, I would ask some questions about the human, and, absent any red flags, I would choose the human, simply out of the need to preserve my own species, even if I think there's more than enough of us and having dogs around would probably make a lot of people's life better than that one person.
Dogs may be a hard no for someone, and yes for someone else. It's kinda arbitrary.
