For too long, robots have had it too easy, and it's starting to show. To get these freeloading bots back to work, neuroscientists from University of Southern California suggest programming them to fear death. By forcing robots to operate in terms of self-preservation -- in addition to whatever other tasks they were assigned -- the scientists suggest that they'll make better choices and become more productive, Popular Mechanics reports. The researchers even suspect that fear of death could be an important stepping stone along the way to true artificial intelligence. The ultimate goal is to build robots and artificial intelligence systems that can evaluate their own behavior, according to research published by the team last month in Nature Machine Intelligence.