>Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience...
Sure, but all the examples of conscious and/or thinking beings that we know of have, at the very least, the capacity to suffer. If one is disposed to take these claims of consciousness and thinking seriously, then it follows that AI research should, at minimum, be more closely regulated until further evidence can be discovered one way or the other. Because the price of being wrong is very, very high.