It's not pointless, though.
This is for at least two reasons.
First, there is a tolerable chance that we will, at some point, have machines that we have reason to believe possess self-awareness and/ or the ability to suffer. It makes sense to straighten out how the law would deal with such machines in advance of that, because to wait until they exist would require making laws on the hop. The go-to example here is provided by Dolly the sheep; when she was born, a lot of legislatures passed hastily-worded and not-all-that-sensible laws; had they not been caught out by events, they may have passed much more sensible laws.
Second, thought experiments like this may help us get our thinking straight about things that do currently exist. One of the things the vid nods towards, despite its flaws, is the treatment of nonhuman animals - and it may extend to very young, very old, or cognitively impaired humans. How should the law treat them, if they are not capable of sentience, a sense of self, or something like that? More radically, if we were to create human embryos that were genetically designed to have no higher brain function, so that we could use them for research/ stem cells/ whatever, would that wrong them? What would their moral and legal status be? Talking in terms of robots is not going to provide all the answers here; but it may help home in on the question of what, if anything, makes a certain entity important and therefore the kind of thing about which the law should concern itself.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:36,
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