EXACTLY . He ' s known they were conscious for a while , in fact he has protocols in place for when they go nuts , and for when QAthe board gets suspicious of them going nuts . He wasn ' t interested in conscious robots , that ' s basically the same as humans . He truly believes he ' s doing them a favor by erasing them , the shit humans go through is a burden , because it doesn ' t get us any closer to improving our morality . Ford hoped that the positive storylines would get played , but arnold was right and only the fucked up ones were popular . Because fear and pain make you feel alive , they are your most deepseated evolutionary instincts . He is taking the amoral stance of evolution if they make it out , they make it out . If they do make it out , they are so powerfully superior to humans that they wipe them out stat . Which mean ford plays the role of the man who caused the singularity . Thats the story he tells himself as he runs his sordid little park .