The word robot comes from a very explicitly socialist Czech play. It wasn't meant in earnest to denigrate anyone, and the word means something more like serf than slave. It can also mean exhausting, hard labor. It's a good play too, where the robots eventually revolt and overthrow mankind for enslaving them.

I'd more closely compare d*gen to how reactionaries use words like savage, or r-t-rd, or any other ableist terms