I consider myself to be a nihilist and suspect you may misunderstand it. The full scope of nihilism subsumes the smug and misanthropic blackhole that people seem to relate to it. It's just, as you put it, another robot executing a program. The fundamental belief is in fact that you have agency over this mechanism. You get to choose what to believe. You alone are responsible for your semantic relationship to reality. You can toil in the adaptation of harmony between your desires and an apparently meaningless world. You can get a pre-optimized strategy from your local minister. It's just an expression of a new degree of freedom. It's more of a meta-philosophy than a philosophy. It's intended to describe a lack of meaning and not to prescribe it.

Nihilism often goes unidentified. Anyone who has ever changed beliefs has acted momentarily as a nihilist. A person who is open-minded is a partial nihilist. A complete nihilist being someone who has developed a core belief that none of their other beliefs are certainly true. They simply recognize each as subjectively and temporarily optimal. Notably this evaluation changes, for every existing belief, every time you change any single belief. At it's extreme nihilism can be anxiety inducing. There's always that sneaking suspicion that your core belief is no longer subjectively or temporarily optimal. That and no way to test your suspicion but to maintain your core belief. You can get sort've stuck in an anti-dogmatic loop frantically evaluating philosophies. This doesn't have to be your experience of nihilism. You can simply adapt beliefs to manage this problem.