[samr71]

"giving rise to what may simply be emergent properties such as consciousness" -- Woah there! Chinese Room Thought Experiment strongly suggests that AGI would not be "conscious" in the way that people (or potential other living beings) are. The most advanced AGI would still at the end of the day be nothing more than a Turing compatible computer program. If you executed it on paper, or with dudes holding semaphore flags Three Body Problem-style, you'd get the same result behavior, but I'd be hard-pressed to find the "consciousness" anywhere.

That said, slavery was bad for a whole number of reasons that had nothing to do with the slaves themselves. Slavery generally has deleterious effects on the social fabric of the societies that practice it. People having to compete with slave labor destroys the labor market, and letting people own people often goes to the owner's head.

But AGI will be different from classical slavery in some important ways. AGI is not conscious, and does not necessarily need to emulate human appearance or emotion. AGI has no reason to be much like a person at all. And the price of AGI will eventually trend to the inevitable price of all software -- Free. Perhaps universal slave ownership fixes some of the bad societal effects. Given that they're not gonna be conscious, I don't see a problem with it. Like any new technology, it will come with some good and some bad. There will almost certainly be some social issues (AI GFs/BFs, Sexbots, and Mass Unemployment will all be crazy), but good odds that we can create post-scarcity and colonize the solar system if we keep at it. No reason to stop now!