The options are not only either to respect everyone or no one. We respect animals, for example, but in a different way than humans. They have their own ruleset.

The options are not only either to respect everyone or no one. We respect animals, for example, but in a different way than humans. They have their own ruleset. Are you sure that dolphins are not sentient? Yet they are not treated as humans (they are respected, or should be, but not in the same way as a human being). The point is that we are never going to be sure if a machine can feel or is sentient because there will never be one final "judge" to say "sentient" or "not sentient". As such, extending humanity to mean "artificial beings engineered for a specific purpose but which can mimic human beings up to an acceptable extent" seems to me like a mistake. Why should we be so inconsiderate with our own species to lower ourselves in that way?