I completely agree with you, slaves were a major cultural and economic motivation behind technological innovation (or lack thereof). Consider the aforementioned

I completely agree with you, slaves were a major cultural and economic motivation behind technological innovation (or lack thereof). Consider the aforementioned example of the cotton gin, which used rather simple tech to replace slaves. This device was only invented when slavery became legally dubious. If Romans (or Greeks, or Egyptians, or the Chinese, etc) of antiquity could have opened their eyes beyond the use of slavery as a source of power, technological innovation would almost certainly have improved