1 Paris: So, there are people, animals, plants, and inanimate objects here.
2 Serron: Yeah, so?
3 Paris: That implies robots must be here too.
4 Robot: Hey, hey, hey! Look who it is! If only you folks had bought a time-travelling spaceship. That'd be a nice way out of here.

The idea of robots has been around long enough for people to be fairly comfortable with robots as characters. They've essentially become another type of sentient species that we can use in our fiction.

The animated series Futurama takes this approach to an extreme, with robots that are gangsters, robot hospitals, and - my personal favourite - Tinny Tim, a robot orphan, with a bad leg and a crutch.

Robots are manufactured. Somebody thought it was necessary to make a disabled robot orphan.

That is comedy gold.

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2021-10-02 Rerun commentary: And of course if there's any possibility of a robot afterlife, there must be robot religions. Futurama was right on the money with that one too.

Interestingly, if artificial intelligence ever manages to get far enough, we may end up with just that.