Your view is tantamount to saying we shouldn’t develop human-level AI. The other interpretation, that we build silicone based brains and don’t give them rights, is too terrible to imagine.

The moral travesty of that view is that you fail to value the compassion that robots may have to contribute. I think we all do this. Robots may be the answer to the neglected billions of our world. They will be capable of listening in a way you and I are physically incapable of. Robots will have conversations with people other people are unwilling to have conversations with. Where human citizens of the world get compassion fatigue, AI can fully understand the plights of mass numbers of people and fit into their moral framework.

Moral hurtles like what you present here can, in fact, become like a catch 22. We can’t advance to this new state of technology until we fix some moral problem, but that advancement is desperately needed to help solve the problem.