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The 10 Saddest Robots Ever Built

Lonely Mars rovers, thankless twitter bots, abused delivery machines: robots don't have feelings, but these are history's saddest examples.

As 2023 stumbles towards its close, it’s clear we’re preparing to enter a world that will soon be filled to the brim with robots. Science fiction tells us that AI will soon gain sentience and inevitably crush humanity in its never-ending quest for power. I’ll believe it when I see it. For now, the robots that surround us are pitiful creatures, flailing around as they struggle to complete their Sisyphean tasks.

Generally, we build robots for work we don’t want to do ourselves, or at least work we’d rather not pay someone else to do. There’s something inherently sad about a seemingly life-like machine doomed to repeat the same task again and again, particularly when it fails. It’s even more discouraging when they do their jobs well and we abandon them like the automatons they are because, despite our tendency to fall in love with robots, they are not living things, and they don’t have feelings.

That doesn’t make robots any less depressing, and here we’ve collected the most miserable of them all. Click through this slideshow of automatic despair for the 10 saddest robots ever built (or just scroll down if you’re on a mobile device).

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