What is it about its suffering and subsequent end that would elicit an empathetic response? In her piece Death and the Machine, Siobhan Lyons describes a group of monkey’s mourning the loss of a robot replica monkey that was inserted into their social circle to record them. She points to how “media commentary had reported that the robot had ‘died’, based on the fact that the other, living monkeys, were mourning it,” (Lyons 3). She ascribes the capability of life and death to our capacity to mourn. The fact that there was such an  empathetic response, as demonstrated on platforms like TikTok, shows how our ability to mourn it ascribes it the capacity of having lived and therefore being able to suffer and die. 

This also introduces the idea that we mourn the robot because of the way its movements mimic our own, where “a machine, being an entity bereft of biological essence, can nevertheless be considered—in theory—a living entity if it comes to reflect values which we ascribe to humans, despite lacking biological origin,” (Lyons 24). The monkey's recognized the robotic monkey to be one of their own, so gave it the same treatment after its end that they would give to a regular monkey. Empathy and sympathy are innate natural parts of us. As the comments in the Tiktok show, people use terms like 'suffering', and attaching other human-like descriptors to the robot. They've read into the robot and transposed their own lived experiences onto something else. They feel seen, and by feeling seen it is easier to empathize with it. This anthropocentric lense is supported by the artists as they created it. In the nitty gritty parts of the software development, the artists created names for each of the machine’s movements, “such as “scratch an itch", "bow and shake,” and “ass shake,” [that] reflect the artists’ intention to animate a machine.” (Guggenheim). There was the intention to humanize the movement of the robot. This makes sense then why people would have such a strong response if the robot was created to already mimic human movements. We want so badly to see ourselves reflected in something that does not communicate with us in the ways we are used to (words), so instead we lean towards our emotions and gut instinct.