> a symbolic protest against the problems posed by delivery robots: the displacement of low-income delivery workers; the physical hazard the robots pose on the sidewalk; and the privacy concerns posed by the robots’ embedded cameras.
everything in her home is made in china because big corps sent our manufacturing jobs overseas where they burn mountains of coal and pollute our environment, all for a higher profit margin. and our politicians say they've reduced their carbon emissions. win win
I still don’t understand how these are allowed to roll down sidewalks. They’re called sidewalks for a reason… they are meant for walking (acknowledging scooters and wheelchairs for those who need it to mode around) but we generally don’t accept someone on a bicycle or someone skating.
Either we let the sidewalk become a free for all or we don’t. I don’t think it’s fair to make exceptions for robots on wheels.
I feel it would be easier to win with patience. An occasional human stands in front of the bot for so long that you have time to call the cops and have them removed?
Well at that point you could probably just re-order (no big deal in the grand scheme of things, it's not a widespread issue), send another bot and have that bot just stare them down right?
I really don't get the need for police intervention here. It's the same way you win against an obstinate child in such a scenario. Patience. Who in this delivery company escalated like this? Why? Has this been worth the negative press over just "hey reorder the takeaway and send another bot"?
Having humans do automateable jobs just to keep them employed is perhaps the worst waste of human potential. Why not replace backhoes with shovels - or spoons! I think we should strive to free our greatest resource, ourselves, to focus on avenues a robot cannot do
Were that the goal of the companies pushing this automation, you'd be 100% right, but they're not going to shift to UBI so you can do art instead of delivering food, they're going to just hoover up as much money from a market as they can and leave people destitute.
People on this website welcome that future. They are absolutely salivating at the idea of a world full of powerless peasants they can shuffle around like objects in their quest to min/max reality.
Nah, this is the land of programmer-peasants, not VCs.
There are certainly some VC-wannabes here too, but most people here realize they're closer to being ground up as biofuel for the delivery bots, than being delivery-bot owners. It's hard to go through the layoff-cycles of modern IT and not realize this.
Agree it results in lots of wasted human hours, not to mention the amount of death and pollution delivery vehicles cause.
I'd like to extend this quote from Stephen Jay Gould:
>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops [and driving cars to deliver burritos]
What this woman is allowed to do makes up a complex topic; there are arguments in all directions. But if her scheme for improving the world involves foremost delaying some people's lunch then she should put some time into coming up with a better plan. Ginning up attention by being unusually petty isn't going to be the path to world peace and prosperity.
When people protest by bringing out the guillotine it is of course too violent and unbridled. When they block bridges then there are ambulances people might die in. When they pour paint on art it destroys priceless works. Now, when someone delays the Uber robot, it causes someone to get their lunch cold. One wonders if effective protest can only be done by sitting quietly at home, so as not to harm anyone or anything.
I was just reading about some environmental protestors outside the first minister's residence in Edinburgh. They're doing a Halloween protest with lots of pumpkins, it seems quite nice.
You're misunderstanding, probably intentionally. GP is not upset on behalf of the cold lunch or the person receiving it. They're saying this is a stupid way to protest. Until she was arrested (which was not an expected or anticipated consequence), it was utterly irrelevant and meaningless. It had no benefit to anyone, brought no attention to what she was upset about (which is moronic anwyays - being mad that robots are taking the "jobs" of DD/UE "workers" is completely misunderstanding the issue), and had no chance of changing anything. It was an idiotic way to "protest".
But go off about guillotines and cold lunches or whatever.
The first step to improving something is to show there’s a problem in the first place. For those who believe sidewalks are for people, she has demonstrated that there is a problem.
The big picture here is that government thugs dragging a person away is now the default response to essentially any type of social disruption, pretty much everywhere in the world.
This would have been unthinkable 200 years ago, during a time we are trained to think of as much more barbaric than the present.
The non-violent aspects of the civil rights movement also featured in so many ways what might be seen as "petty" disruptions of every day life.
...Not to say that blocking a delivery robot is an apt comparison to getting out of nam, or racial equality. Just that petty disruption is a time-honored tradition of protest in the US.
A group of people decided to put machines out there in the streets. Did we collectively decide this or is it just out there? Because at this point I don’t know anymore. Not only they put out there, there is legal enforcement surrounding it.
I can’t see this going well short term. Long term, maybe.
Do you mean we should cherry-pick laws under which they are classified as cars? Or are you suggesting we should not allow delivery robots on sidewalks at all, as we do with cars?
If not cars, whatever suitable existing legislation or classification or if needed a new regulation to make this sensible. Millions of people benefit from fast delivery, so something has to be decided, either rules of interaction with pedestrians or new tracks for these robots or anything else.
Here I am, brain the size of a planet and I have to move for a delivery drone. And I have this awful pain in the diodes down my right side. Life? Don't tell me about life.
I don’t want robots on the sidewalk because I guarantee they won’t move out of the way of people jogging, kids riding bikes, older people, etc. They’re moving obstacles. Delivery drones are a more respectful option, as long as they’re quiet like the Zipline ones Walmart uses.
The scape goating of delivery robots (vandalism, destruction, or obstruction) as trying to stick it to Big Tech and “capitalism” is an immediate tell of an underdeveloped political education. She certainly must be a communications professor.
I work in Philly where this happened. I consider myself a pretty mild mannered person, but even I get an urge to kick these things while walking home during rush hour on busy sidewalks lol. They are mostly harmless though
There's a difference between not giving way to a robot vs spending 10-15 minutes actively blocking it.
Yes, we're going to quickly come to a head on the issue of robots on sidewalks, much like we have with e-scooters, or Google's ill-fated bikes.
The robots open a new possibility on an existing system (sidewalks), which is going to lead to problems from both sides until the legislature comes up with new rules. This is how free and democratic societies work.
I just don't understand how some people think. THey seem to think in terms of positive rights, ie any new type of action is something that you ask permission for. I never heard this anywhere, at least most legal systems are based on the negative view being the default. These same people would then whine their drone hobby got banned or they are not allowed to fix their car in their backyard.
Actually, Japan is one of those interesting cultures that traditionally inverts permission. That's slowly going away now in many areas as they adopt a more western approach, but it's part of their culture's origins.
In the 1920s, "jay" was a slur similar to "country bumpkin" — an unsophisticated person who didn't understand the city. As cars became more common, the term "jaywalker" emerged, and the auto industry's PR arm seized on it and eventually helped it codify into law. Before jaywalking was a thing, newspapers blamed drivers for accidents, assuming people had the right to walk anywhere (as they always had) and cars needed to yield. It didn't take long for the auto industry — makers of the hottest new technology in the world — to convince their friends in the media to flip the narrative and start shaming pedestrians for getting in the way of cars.
The way I see it, as a new technology builds momentum it starts to accumulate power in many ways. Control of the narrative is just one piece of that.
I think of it as a long term negotiation with society about what we are all willing to sacrifice for the conveniences of a new technology.
I don't think that negotiation ever ends, either. It just evolves with the tech. Robert Moses exuberantly covered New York City with highways during the mid 20th century. Each new bridge and highway he built induced demand for more cars. So, every road was clogged as soon as it opened. And his answer was always to build more roads.
Moses built a base of power that depended in part on revenue from toll booths. But, some of his projects were disastrous for communities and should not have ever happened. Because of his fixation on cars, and because of how he was benefitting from cars, he was unable to recognize that a city's transportation infrastructure must be balanced between different modes.
Personal cars are almost the least ideal form of transportation for a dense city and for intercity traffic. But once the power around a single technology becomes locked in, it can freeze the negotiation around it and the power structures can safely ignore any further resistance.
> Before jaywalking was a thing, newspapers blamed drivers for accidents, assuming people had the right to walk anywhere (as they always had) and cars needed to yield.
This is not the full story, even before cars came into common use, society had to figure out how to manage pedestrians coexisting with horses and carriages on public roadways.
Eg. Check out the UK's Highway Act 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Act_1835). It criminalized riding or driving a carriage on the footway (sidewalk) and made both pedestrians and drivers responsible for using due care to avoid collisions in the road.
This was a long-term societal shift to having dedicated infrastructure for both pedestrians and vehicles to avoid collisions, not some sort of sinister auto industry scheme.
I would suspect safety had more to do with it than anything else. The closest I've ever personally come to hitting someone was because they jaywalked directly in front of my car, after walking between two parked vans so they were not visible until they strode right out in front of me. It was a near thing, but my reaction time is good and I am pretty attentive to what is in front of me. But physics is a harsh mistress, it is a dumb game to play.
We're not going to get rid of cars, much as some people think that would be a net improvement, so the sensible thing to do is make pedestrian crossings plentiful, obvious, and respected by both drivers and walkers. Public space is shared.
> In the aftermath of her arrest, Marvin has found out more about the legal infrastructure that protects robots. In 2020, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law that classifies autonomous delivery robots — what the law calls “personal delivery devices” — as pedestrians, not vehicles. Democrats, along with labor unions and accessibility advocates, largely opposed the law on the basis that legalizing delivery robots could kill jobs and endanger children and pedestrians; Republicans touted it as an exciting technological advancement.
> The law means that a vehicle must yield to a delivery robot on crosswalks, just as it would to a person
She was pretty restrained. Erlich Bachman's way of dealing with the robot deer might be the future.
I wonder why children haven't discovered a "block the robot" game yet and score points for the longest blockade. Maybe they aren't allowed to go outside in the US.
These robots are all over the place around here. They use the sidewalks, but beyond that they need space for deployment and space to wait while idle. They don’t just pop out from a little tiny door like in Star Wars.
In my old neighborhood they had a forward operating base in an empty lot along a moderately busy street, one with plenty of foot traffic on the sidewalks. People often use the lot to play with their dogs.
Every day a truck pulls up, taking up several public parking spots, and over the course of an hour, the driver unloads 20-30 delivery bots. Then the bots line themselves up in the grass just off the sidewalk. This acts as their home base while they wait for deliveries.
It’s possible the operators have a deal with whoever owns the land, but it seems more like they’re opportunistically exploiting any resources they can find in order to reduce costs. Which is pretty much in line with what I’d expect from a startup.
No way her name is actually Marvin? What a perfect coincidence! Is "Marvin" destined to become the robot age's answer to "Karen"? :-) Those poor souls, forever tormented by their aching diodes...
64 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadeverything in her home is made in china because big corps sent our manufacturing jobs overseas where they burn mountains of coal and pollute our environment, all for a higher profit margin. and our politicians say they've reduced their carbon emissions. win win
Either we let the sidewalk become a free for all or we don’t. I don’t think it’s fair to make exceptions for robots on wheels.
Well at that point you could probably just re-order (no big deal in the grand scheme of things, it's not a widespread issue), send another bot and have that bot just stare them down right?
I really don't get the need for police intervention here. It's the same way you win against an obstinate child in such a scenario. Patience. Who in this delivery company escalated like this? Why? Has this been worth the negative press over just "hey reorder the takeaway and send another bot"?
There are certainly some VC-wannabes here too, but most people here realize they're closer to being ground up as biofuel for the delivery bots, than being delivery-bot owners. It's hard to go through the layoff-cycles of modern IT and not realize this.
I'd like to extend this quote from Stephen Jay Gould:
>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops [and driving cars to deliver burritos]
Are you off your rocker or just completely unfamiliar with the history of human rights and civil liberties?
But go off about guillotines and cold lunches or whatever.
This would have been unthinkable 200 years ago, during a time we are trained to think of as much more barbaric than the present.
The non-violent aspects of the civil rights movement also featured in so many ways what might be seen as "petty" disruptions of every day life.
...Not to say that blocking a delivery robot is an apt comparison to getting out of nam, or racial equality. Just that petty disruption is a time-honored tradition of protest in the US.
that's how you get people's attention to something, bring about public discourse, which can lead to political action
I can’t see this going well short term. Long term, maybe.
Quote from a lawyer in the article:
> Personal delivery devices must yield to other pedestrians and pedalcyclists in a pedestrian area
Sounds like the robot legally had to yield to her. If so, what lawful basis would the officer have had to make the order?
That sounds like the robot tried to yield and she purposefully moved to counter that.
That would likely support a charge for obstructing traffic or disorderly conduct or something similar.
Now the story is that the police came and protected an innocent robot by chaining up an old woman. That sure makes them seem like misanthropes.
Its not the robot you have less rights than, but the corporation. Cops' job is to do their bidding.
Yes, we're going to quickly come to a head on the issue of robots on sidewalks, much like we have with e-scooters, or Google's ill-fated bikes.
The robots open a new possibility on an existing system (sidewalks), which is going to lead to problems from both sides until the legislature comes up with new rules. This is how free and democratic societies work.
As car ownership increased, it seems possible that norms would change a bit.
I think of it as a long term negotiation with society about what we are all willing to sacrifice for the conveniences of a new technology.
I don't think that negotiation ever ends, either. It just evolves with the tech. Robert Moses exuberantly covered New York City with highways during the mid 20th century. Each new bridge and highway he built induced demand for more cars. So, every road was clogged as soon as it opened. And his answer was always to build more roads.
Moses built a base of power that depended in part on revenue from toll booths. But, some of his projects were disastrous for communities and should not have ever happened. Because of his fixation on cars, and because of how he was benefitting from cars, he was unable to recognize that a city's transportation infrastructure must be balanced between different modes.
Personal cars are almost the least ideal form of transportation for a dense city and for intercity traffic. But once the power around a single technology becomes locked in, it can freeze the negotiation around it and the power structures can safely ignore any further resistance.
This is not the full story, even before cars came into common use, society had to figure out how to manage pedestrians coexisting with horses and carriages on public roadways.
Eg. Check out the UK's Highway Act 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Act_1835). It criminalized riding or driving a carriage on the footway (sidewalk) and made both pedestrians and drivers responsible for using due care to avoid collisions in the road.
This was a long-term societal shift to having dedicated infrastructure for both pedestrians and vehicles to avoid collisions, not some sort of sinister auto industry scheme.
... jay driving was a thing first.
I would suspect safety had more to do with it than anything else. The closest I've ever personally come to hitting someone was because they jaywalked directly in front of my car, after walking between two parked vans so they were not visible until they strode right out in front of me. It was a near thing, but my reaction time is good and I am pretty attentive to what is in front of me. But physics is a harsh mistress, it is a dumb game to play.
We're not going to get rid of cars, much as some people think that would be a net improvement, so the sensible thing to do is make pedestrian crossings plentiful, obvious, and respected by both drivers and walkers. Public space is shared.
> In the aftermath of her arrest, Marvin has found out more about the legal infrastructure that protects robots. In 2020, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law that classifies autonomous delivery robots — what the law calls “personal delivery devices” — as pedestrians, not vehicles. Democrats, along with labor unions and accessibility advocates, largely opposed the law on the basis that legalizing delivery robots could kill jobs and endanger children and pedestrians; Republicans touted it as an exciting technological advancement.
> The law means that a vehicle must yield to a delivery robot on crosswalks, just as it would to a person
I wonder why children haven't discovered a "block the robot" game yet and score points for the longest blockade. Maybe they aren't allowed to go outside in the US.
In my old neighborhood they had a forward operating base in an empty lot along a moderately busy street, one with plenty of foot traffic on the sidewalks. People often use the lot to play with their dogs.
Every day a truck pulls up, taking up several public parking spots, and over the course of an hour, the driver unloads 20-30 delivery bots. Then the bots line themselves up in the grass just off the sidewalk. This acts as their home base while they wait for deliveries.
It’s possible the operators have a deal with whoever owns the land, but it seems more like they’re opportunistically exploiting any resources they can find in order to reduce costs. Which is pretty much in line with what I’d expect from a startup.