Upvoting just for the delightfully practical example of underwater basket weaving.

@Mast This seems like a feature rather than a bug for a fantastical medieval setting; add in some flavor where the medieval folks believe that the workers are dying because they literally poured their souls into the preserved texts, or something like that.

@Cyn Exactly! The robots don't even need faces for us to personify them-- think of how people talk about their roombas, as if they were charming pets who get "distressed" when they get stuck. I know I'm prone to gently patting the dashboard of my car when it starts beeping because it thinks I'm about to do something stupid, as if it was a jumpy horse in need of comforting, and not a big chunk of machinery. Anthropomorphizing is just what humans do.

This is an excellent answer-- the last paragraph might benefit from a note on how well humans do with abstractions of a human face. Even infants will stare at a picture that looks like this: :-| longer than other combinations of the same symbols. We understand what :) and :( mean easily, and the Russians even drop the eyballs, conveying the same emotions just with ) and (. The fake expressions on robots don't need to be a perfect mimicry of a human face, because humans are excellent at abstraction.

@NathanCooper Ayuup. This is almost certainly going to end up in places that OP might not intend, especially given that a lot of traditional depictions of goblins are essentially just anti-semitic caricature. Anything where creatures with some amount of sentience are put into the position of slaves is going to sound a little bad to a lot of modern readers.

@Joshua I'm not sure where you got the idea that bats can't get rabies from. Any warm-blooded animal can contract rabies. (Birds and cold-blooded creatures can develop it, but these cases are rare and often seen in labs. However, it's generally not lethal in birds.)

@aherocalledFrog Opossums actually very rarely carry rabies! While they can carry it, like all mammals, their body temperature is naturally a bit low for the rabies virus, so they're unlikely to develop it.