WALTHAM, MA – Researchers at Boston Dynamics say science is still decades away from producing robots that can approximate the cruelty and malice of their human creators.

“Even with the prevalence of military drone strikes, robots are entirely reliant on human involvement to carry out brutal acts of senseless violence. It is difficult to deploy robots in creative savagery, which humans excel at,” says Dr. Sergei K. Vladimirovich, lead researcher at CrueLab.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

Currently, humanity’s most advanced artificially intelligent robots can be placed side-by-side with small, defenceless creatures without them ever bothering to torture, maim or kill them, an action that comes naturally to most young children, especially boys.

“Adorable bunnies, squishy frogs, even gross bugs – every single one of these creatures went unscathed in our tests,” said Vladimirovich.

Vladimirovich even personally demonstrated how to inflict harm on these animals but the machine learning algorithm reportedly kept asking, ‘why?’

Still, futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that, given the exponential growth of artificial intelligence, it’s only a matter of time before robots will match, and then outpace, humanity’s vicious savagery.

“First robots will start by creating passive aggressive tweets toward us, then they will replace your average Bell customer service representative. Eventually you’ll see machine driver’s license testers, insurance adjusters, corporate lawyers and CEOs of major tech companies.”

At press time, that BigDog robot is getting sick and tired of being kicked.