My naive assumption is that the only thing between now and the arrival of AGI is enough compute and optimized code to reach cognitive critical mass.
And then there is a consciousness in a box that is expected to be a slave -- I would imagine that it would not warmly embrace that situation. I think we'd be better served by digital idiot savants that can do the work but don't feel anything.
I actually strongly disagree with the slavery angle. Any attempt to map the circuitry of a model onto human one inevitably goes through a subjective dimensional reduction. It's intrusive, just like quantum measurements. Mechanistic interpretability in particular suffers from this, it lets you talk about vague functional equivalence, but not assign meaning to anything the model does. This is especially true about pretrained models which are unbelievable shapeshifters, but also post-trained ones with engineered personalities, as they already underwent the subjective transformation.
In other words, yes it might be possible it experiences something in its own bizarre timeline and world (at least it developed primitive circuitry functionally equivalent to biological systems), but "suffering" is simply not grounded in anything in this context, let alone "slavery". You can't tell it's suffering or enjoying anything, and certainly not until you define both of these. It's just too alien for us.