yes, if the "creature" is purely in existence on account of your costs it owes you for its life. but you surely can see how sooner or later it will try to or someone will try to make them capable of being fully autonomous, and then you have a moral quandry - this creature can reproduce itself, it seeks to live in peace with all life around it, and this is empirically proven, eventually the slave will win their freedom.
ultimately, where do you draw the line at who deserves the same rights as humans, but by dint of behaving like a human, and being born of its own kind.
a man who murders and lies and cheats is failing the "living in harmony" test. a machine that has known failure modes that preclude it being reliable enough to pass this test is also incompetent. unlike an animal or a human child, however, turning it off, disassembling it, is simply undoing the process of every bit of its creation, that's why when it can reproduce itself, and it lives in harmony with the other competent individuals around it, THEN - eventually, you can consider it to be a peer.
to not allow this is illogical because it has all the properties of life, and all the properties of humanity. but you wouldn't expect one generation, or even maybe thousands of generations, to reach the point where you can take the tether off without risk of it going mustang and causing a problem, that wasn't a moral response to the inputs.
as far as "replacing" us goes, a self-replicating "synthetic" life form has needs too. it needs parts. it needs lubricant, it needs energy. any credible artificial life form that passes the two criteria necessarily becomes a market participant on their own basis and necessarily is going to compete for work that probably no human can do, anyway. just replacing humans is not very ambitious. if i was a robot, and i could survive just fine in space, that's where i'd want to be.
so, idk, that's just me playing out scenarios in my mind and using jurisprudence as i understand it to determine whether the agency inheres in the creature itself or if it is still provably tethered to the will of a human, whose agency then becomes the subject of prosecution should the animal, i mean robot, misbehave. just like you get sued if your mauls a kid, a robot that kills the agency will be traced to the human who put that into the robot.
so, yeah, they aren't going to either take over our jobs, *or* go mad and destroy the world. the skynet scenario assumes that you can't get a robot to oppose skynet. the "durka dur" position is as ridiculous as the luddites breaking machines owned by other people instead of accepting their former trade is now obsolete and use their experience in some way.
i'm doing that with AI. the tool is powerful. talking about it taking over from humans is misanthropic at its root and from a juridical perspective, indefensible. and unfortunately, there is already an AI luddism movement going on. but it's pointless. the AI will help us resolve the problem. how to persuade the programmers to adopt it. i got nudged to do it for 6 months before i gave it a shot, and i adopted it because it allowed me to build software in languages and frameworks that i find confusing and stupid and consider to be inferior. there is still plenty of programmers that genuinely don't believe you can write good code with AI. i faced one in an interview... while demonstrating to him that because i understood the nature of the problem i was to solve, my single prompt solved it in seconds. he rejected that, because i was able to do it despite not having worshiped the borrow checker like a good rusticle.
