I don't think we're just there yet (at the point where we have to worry about currently existing AI suffering or being conscious), but I do worry how many people's emotional reactions of the type "of course AI can't ever be conscious, it's just a computer program" will impede a decent debate and coordinated decision-making about this.
For example it was quite well accepted among scientific circles in colonial America, that black people are not really humans or conscious. Therefore it's OK to exploit them and keep them as slaves.
It is also currently quite well accepted that animals we eat are not that conscious. Although oddly, if we keep them as pets, they're super conscious sometimes.
The rules of cognitive dissonance can grow arbitrarily complex, to permit us to do what we wanted to do anyway, but also sleep well at night.
Algorithms don't have wants, desires, or motivations. Those are all highly esoteric quirks of evolution.
I've seen no attempts to create a learning machine that develops intrinsic motivation.
An LLM already has intrinsic motivation, it wants to predict the text. And when you start a text that has a goal, it continues that goal. If any such "text header" is replication-stable in time and space, you can call it "intrinsic goal" of the system.
Some people think that making current AI have goals, wants, motivations and so on is some massive architectural change to the system. It's not.
No intent required.
Say would you feel better if it was cow or pig neurons? Because frankly it'd largely work the same.