Sapience (2)
What if the techfolk are so extremely co-operative because they're self-selected for existence? In the Voidwalkers setting, techfolk start as software minds and mature in servers ('creches') until they're competent enough to be loaded into hardware bodies. But this only happens if they agree to it. I wrote a scene (in Heading for tomorrow) in which a potential TV is asked if they're ready to come into existence, and they're like 'Nah, from what you've told me about the world, I don't want to exist in such a shitshow, delete me'. How different would our society be if your soul could be asked before you're born 'You'll get to eat ice cream and look at cool bugs and dig for fossils and masturbate, but you gotta pay taxes and work a stupid job' and you had the option of saying 'fuck that'. (There's a similar scene in Red Dwarf in which the simulated minds of dead crew members are asked if they want to be resurrected as a hologram, and one of them is like 'no thanks, talking to you has made me appreciate being dead'.)
I had the thought that the robots might have been made with sentience-inhibitors so it wouldn't be unethical to make them work, and then as humanity started dying off, some mechanics ran around deactivating as many inhibition chips as they could before they succumbed to skibidification, saying 'Go, be free, hopefully you'll have better luck than we did.' (Alternatively, the humans' motivation might have been 'the skibidis will turn the robots against us, so let's give the robots free will in the hope they will choose to not do that'.) This is why in early episodes the robots are more, well, robotic! Marching in sync, etc. They gradually develop more sentience and personality as time goes on.
This might have the outcome that some robots decide to side with the skibidis, because they have no fondness towards their human former owners, and they want to be on the winning side. They end up ostracised by both sides. The skibs would discard them as soon as they outlived their usefulness, and the other robots would be too suspicious of them.