Why do people so badly want everything to be about race?
Jim Crow "ended" (it's what we tell ourselves) in the south in 1965 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our last two presidents were adults when that happened, and it's not like racism was solved when those laws were passed.
The US still has a lot of work to do here - it's absurd to me to hear US Conservatives talking about how slavery ended in the 1860s so we should end protections for African Americans because it's been "so long". It hasn't, and they know that.
Like, clanker is the equivalent of a racial slur but for robots. The reason it works and is funny is because we already know what racial slurs are and have a contexr for it.
If racial slurs didn't exist, neither would clanker.
You have to actually think about the world we live in and why things are the way they are. Its a easy to say "just cuz lol", but we're engineers. Nothing happens "just cuz". No, there's a reason.
Now, true AGI? There's a debate to be had there regarding rights etc. But you better be able to prove that a so-called AGI is truly sentient before you push for that. This isn't Data. There is nothing even remotely close to sentience present in any LLM. I don't even know if AGI is going to be achievable within 100 years. But as far as I'm concerned, AI "slurs" are just blowback against the invasion of AI into everyday life, as is increasingly common. There will be a point where the hard discussion of "does true artificial general intelligence deserve rights" will happen. That time is not now, except as a thought experiment.