If we accept that GAI is far off, though, it's very likely that we simply can't have a productive conversation about it at this time. In fact, such conversations could even be counterproductive if we make incorrect assumptions, leading to the illusion of safety.
Most talks about the dangers of AI assume we'll one day finally "break through" and create a metaphorical ghost in the machine, at which point all bets are off. However, this scenario seems awfully unlikely to me. Human intelligence is far beyond that of any other known organism, but there are plenty of intelligent animals on Earth, and the process of solving GAI will almost certainly produce intelligence on par with those animals before it breaks through to human-level intelligence. Dog-level intelligence is a decent milestone; at that point, we'll clearly have created GAI in the sense of creating a being that can exhibit truly "intelligent" behavior (including emotions), but it's clearly not intelligent enough to cause any problems that are specific to GAI. The rebuttal to this argument is that a generalized learning algorithm running on a computer will be far more powerful than a dog's brain, but it's fallacious to assume that the only difference between a dog and a human is the processing powers of their brains. That would imply that a bigger brain (however you choose to measure it) is all that's needed to create more intelligence. As far as we can tell, this isn't true, and architectural differences (which imply "software" differences) seem important for creating higher intelligence.
When we do get to GAI, we don't know if it'll be through software running on a "normal" computer, or if it'll be running on specialized hardware in a specialized shell designed to navigate a real environment, or if it'll be in some other form that we haven't really thought of yet. The dangers and resolutions are very different between those forms, and when we don't seem close to GAI at all, it can be argued that talk about its "dangers" may be a complete waste of time, or perhaps even counterproductive to safety in the long-run.
Why are emotions required for intelligence?
But second, it may very well be true that emotions are necessary for GAI. The GAI probably needs to have some sort of basic instinct or drive; otherwise it'll just exhibit completely random behavior because it has no actual intentions (remember we can't explicitly program intentions for tasks, because then it's not general intelligence). The very fact that the GAI will "want" to act according its instincts/drives implies it needs some concept of satisfaction or at least desire. I think that satisfaction and desire meet most definitions of "emotion," and they can absolutely lead to emotional (as opposed to logical) behavior because any GAI is going to be basing satisfiability and desire off of heuristics, not perfect data, because the instincts/drives need to be general themselves, such that it's impossible to deterministically satisfy them. (Otherwise, the behavior degenerates into something we would recognize as non-intelligent.)
I say "probably" at the start of all of that because we've never made GAI, so it's impossible to know for sure what it takes to get there. However, that model is coherent with evolution and the animal (particularly mammalian) condition. It's unclear exactly what the drives of animals are--easy guesses are survival and reproduction--but we know there are biological responses that heavily guide animal behavior.
For example, we don't eat to live so much as we eat because relief from hunger is enjoyable. However, we've developed an even more abstracted response, and so most of us just kind of like to each in general, even when we're not particularly hungry. When our body can tell we're eating, it releases dopamine, which associates to a mood of well-being. This elevate mood is an emotional response; it's the high-level abstraction we use to choose our behavior.
More complex decisions (involving social situations or whatnot) can just be mapped to ever-higher abstractions that are enforced through mechanisms we developed through evolution. Therefore, it can be argued that literally 100% of high-level decision making is emotional. Even if we ultimately use logic to try to make the best decision, our determination of what we want out of the "best decision" is still emotional. Even more extreme, it may be true that emotion turns out to be the definition of general intelligence, because it's at that point that the agent is making decisions in arbitrary situations based on some sort of internally consistent desire, rather than a prescriptive goal.
So, the idea of a cold drone that can do everything a human can do, but doesn't feel any desire or emotion, may in fact be a contradiction. Achieving behavior that complex may not be possible (in the real world, with the data available in our plane of existence) without some emotional mechanism.