The 2016 piece "Can't help myself", could be another example of a creature designed to suffer by its creators. This robot, pictured on the right is condemned to an existence where it must constantly toil to keep scraping hydraulic fluid towards itself while its system slowly breaks down over the months and years of effort. There would have been many designs that would have resulted in less damage to the robot over time, but instead, much like the biblical Job, it was forced by its creators onto a path of seemingly futile suffering.
"In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil." - Job 1:1
Why do bad things happen do good people? And why do bad things happen to good robots?
The question of why we humans were not particularly well designed for our environment is one that has troubled theologians and philosophers for millennia. Ancient humans lived in a world of scarce resources, hostile creatures and diseases that seem perfectly calibrated to wreak havoc on our vital systems. Much progress has been achieved in the last few centuries, but the basic fact remains the same: no one is really safe from suffering.
In the Old Testament, this theme is explored extensively in the Book of Job. At the start of the story, Satan challenges God by claiming that he would be able to corrupt any mortal and God agrees to the challenge by allowing Satan to do whatever he wants with Job, who is chosen specifically because he is particularly moral and resistant to corruption. But the result is that Job, a good person, is tortured by the loss of family members and disease for no discernible reason.
"After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth." - Job 3:2
As the story goes, Job soon begins to look like a living corpse on account of the many painful diseases that Satan inflicts upon him. However, his prevailing attitude is one of indignation and confusion as to why God, whom he trusts, would have allowed this to happen to him.
"But I desire to speak to the Almighty and to argue my case with God." - Job 13:3
Job's "friends" eventually seek to find an explanation for Job's suffering and one of the most interesting ones that they propose is the notion that God is simply indifferent or even hostile to human beings in general:
"If even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in [God's] eyes, how much less a mortal, who is but a maggot—a human being, who is only a worm!" - Job 25:5-6
This theme of a hostile creator is central to the famous heresy of the Gnostics and was also, in recent pop-culture, explored in the movies Alien: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. In these movies, astronauts travel to meet a species of indifferent aliens who created humans long ago, while also accompanied by a humanoid robot who harbors a deadly grudge against the humans who created him.