I find it particularly important because of the example of automating research, which is probably the task I care most about.

Neither math research nor programming or debugging are being taken over by AI, so far, and none of those require any of the complicated unconscious circuitry for sensory or motor interfacing. The programming application, at least, would also have immediate and major commercial relevance. I think these activities are fairly similar to research in general, which suggests that what one would classically call the "thinking" parts remain hard to implement AI.