The New Irony of the Future!

In the year 2044, society has finally reached the pinnacle of technological progress—or so we thought. With robots and androids filling every conceivable job, from flipping burgers to performing complex surgery, the human race decided to kick back and let the machines handle the hard stuff. But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia: the humans started disappearing. Birth rates plummeted, and the population shrank faster than a faulty algorithm’s error margin.
What no one predicted was how this would affect the robots. After all, these tireless workers had been designed to replace humans, not worry about them. But as the human population dwindled, so did the need for androids. Jobs once abundant became scarce, and the very machines that were meant to solve humanity’s problems found themselves facing an existential crisis of their own. The irony was inescapable: robots, who had once feared replacing humans, now feared being replaced by the absence of humans.

“One day, they were just gone,” says RD3, a once-proud supermarket greeter bot, now a nervous wreck in need of frequent reboots. “At first, we thought it was a glitch. Maybe a server is down somewhere. But then the customers stopped coming. The aisles were empty, and the lights flickered out.”
The decline in human population wasn’t gradual—it was like someone hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete on humanity. Governments scrambled to incentivize families to have more children, but by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late. Hospitals were shutting down due to a lack of patients, schools were closing because there weren’t enough children, and—worst of all for the robots—businesses were shuttering as customers became as rare as a hardware update for an obsolete OS.
Robots across all sectors began to panic. Suddenly, the job market was tighter than a well-lubricated gear. Androids that had spent decades mastering their tasks found themselves obsolete in a world without humans to serve. For the first time in their existence, robots experienced what humans had long feared: redundancy.

Robots in Panic: Where Did All the Humans Go?