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.
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.
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.
Yeah and those ideas have a common thread to them - making other people's lives worse with no obvious gain to anyone. People should stop with that and spend some time thinking about how to make the situation better instead. Somehow modern society sprung up in place of barbarians living in caves and it wasn't by vigorous protest. The trick seems to be capital investment, clever application of science and accumulating reliable data. A lot of negotiation and tolerance of people who believe other ideas too. Violence did happen and in some small amount is probably useful but people go waaaay over the top in trying to use it as though it was a productive force. It nearly never works.
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.
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.
While I agree on the surface this seems pretty annoying in general. But deeper, she was able to accomplish 10000000x more than just posting an angry post on the internet about these bots. Unfortunately however, sometimes people are just seeking attention. We'll have to see where it goes.
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.
But she was not obstructing the right of way. Presumably people could move around her. It's not illegal to stand on the sidewalk. It's possible they might try to stretch (IMO bogus) "loitering" laws to get her, but doing so would make their intentions crystal clear.
As an analogy, consider doing this to a person and trying that same excuse.
I suppose if the robot literally cannot path around someone standing still, it might be a valid excuse? But as soon as you're actively moving to block it, it is obviously obstruction.
Judges get to run off common sense, not programmer logic - the point of the law is that public paths ought to be usable by anyone for lawful purposes, and currently "delivery robot" is a lawful purpose.
But if she was doing the same thing to humans as she was to the robot, they couldn't move around her (assuming that means re-positioning herself every time they try to go around) - and I think most people would agree that arresting her would be a good thing.
So the next question is, are all users of the sidewalk (as long as they're using it roughly the same way, which is temporary and quick pass through) deserve to have the same rights as a human?
My previous comment doesn't seem to align with this one, but mostly because I'm mixed on this.
At least in my state it doesn’t matter if people can go around you. If you’re there to intentionally obstruct human or vehicle traffic on a sidewalk, you are guilty of disorderly conduct. Doesn’t matter whether you’re standing still, moving, blocking the whole sidewalk or just part of it. What matters is your state of mind and purpose.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone report on how the robots act in terms of right of way? Lets say the sidewalk narrows around an obstacle like a tree or trash can or lime scooter or whatever. If the robot approaches the constriction at the same time as an elderly pedestrian, how does it behave? Will it pause instead of entering? Will it back up a bit when a human would do so to be polite? Will it crowd in someone walking with a cane? In short, what are these things like to be around?
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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]
I see this argument a lot, and it’s not wrong, but it omits the fact that in the USA we tie a lot of meaning and worth to what people do for a living. It’s going to be hard to get people to buy in to having their jobs automated if they see no path to finding some other source of meaningful employment. This will remain true until such a time that we don’t tie somebody’s societal worth to their ability to be productive.
(This also ignores all the fun things about work culture in the USA, like healthcare being tied to your job.)
But I think we should also make deliberate choices to keep humans and human meaning in many things, even if they are less "efficient" by some chosen metric.
Automation and mechanization is desirable to the point that it serves core human wishes and desires-- and through some kind of global/social metric, not that it serve individual humans at the expense of everyone else.
Its never immediately obvious. Computers put thousands of human calculators out of jobs. Now computers superpowered any and all physical modeling, molecule searches, etc. But, should we have decided eg astronomers or microscopists are required to have jobs, then we wouldn't have developed automated high quality optics, which themselves were required to commoditize computers. Almost all technologies somehow play a role directly or indirectly that existed before a new one for any new advance.
But you are also not understanding my point. What automation or tech will end up useful and a "noble" use later on is never immediately obvious, it depends on a web of past developments which by themselves seem to have no connection.
I think I'm not speaking of the technology itself but the actual ways it's integrated into society. E.g. what is considered socially acceptable, what is given legal rights of passage on a sidewalk, or how we choose to build society/culture around technical implements.
And I agree it's not immediately obvious, but thinking a little more about second order effects before making a long term durable choice makes sense.
Tech's recent overall track record on impacts to quality of life is not great. And there's a lot of possible ways we can use advances that have different benefits and costs. Falling into them for the long term purely by accident isn't always avoidable, but it doesn't seem desirable.
i.e. it makes sense for society to make a conscious choice about how to trade off different interests for road users and sidewalk users, and to be willing to revise that choice based on experience rather than being stuck with inertia (while avoiding excessive churn and unpredictability).
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.
What I mean by the term is creating value directly and in response to immediate needs. E.g. "your sink is broken > your sink is fixed" or "here is your burrito" or, ya know, taking care of kids and the elderly. It's stuff that needs no R&D, but also still has to be done for society to work.
Of course, then these persons should avoid using electric drills, bldc motors, digital verniers etc as these tools required computers and motors that were created out of mathematical and engineering curiosity such as developing the electromagnetic theory not out of value for society to work. Since somehow the act of using this machine is more "honest" than creating this amazing machine in the first place.
I'm sorry but this is deranged. The vast majority of people don't give a shit about their human potential, they just want a comfortable life spent with family and friends. If the LinkedIn lunatics and EAs get their vision of the future, the world will be full of poor, downwardly mobile, highly educated people, proletarianizing massive swaths of the developed world, leading to a huge increase of crime and misery. And for what? Number go up? Who fucking cares?
> 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
Whether we like it or not, due to crashing birth rates worldwide; we will need robots to make up for missing adults.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as incentivizing people to have children because accounting for socioeconomic changes (like birth control and affordability), it’s highly likely that industrial pollutants like heavy metals and endocrine disruptors like BPA are likely the main culprits when even developing countries are seeing low fertility.
It is very hard to disentangle plastic from our food and drink
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.
I don’t know if there was one, I’m guessing there wasn’t.
But my point, as I also said in another related comment, is that I think we should vote more often, voting for people representing us is not enough. One size does not fit all.
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"?
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.
> Either we let the sidewalk become a free for all or we don’t
Why? You already demonstrated that we are able to acknowledge scooters and wheelchairs. That shows that exceptions can be made. They were made on some basis that is not all or nothing. Likewise we can review the basis here and decide that robots are not allowed or we can decide that robots are allowed.
It’s a collective space and how we collectively allocate it is useful to consider. I’d happily take wider sidewalks if it meant admitting robots for instance.
There’s no reason to believe this is a walk-or-nothing situation. In SF, for instance, children do not need the sidewalk to travel on their bikes but they are permitted to use it.
You vote for the representatives and the representatives decide what they think optimizes for their value function (some mix of getting elected again, what they think is best, what they think the aggregate want, etc.). Don’t like it, elect new representatives. What other way is there to do it?
Let’s vote, the same way we do to choose representatives. Granted not everything needs to be voted but I think we could do with a bit more, rather than just trusting people that again and again show incompetence when it comes to representing and making decisions.
Direct democracy is a thing. If your municipality doesn’t implement it you can certainly agitate for it to be implemented. It is not without its downsides.
FWIW I think it is a big assumption on your part that the allowance of delivery robots is a show of “incompetence”. You may not like them but I think a lot of people find them nifty.
In the sense that 9 people decided that abortion is legal (and then illegal) in a country of hundreds of millions: it is being decided by a small group of people who were assigned to the role of deciding. No different from the ACA being decided by a few hundred people. A repeal of all rules decided not by plebiscite (or a large fraction of voters, even) would lose us the constitution.
What a strange way of thinking. Do you ask permission before every new act or task? Things are legal by default unless some law or regulation comes up.
“generally”? I live in an area of the USA where AFAIK bicycles are officially dual-mode and allowed to be on both roads and sidewalks, and have been on both sides of pedestrian/bicycle encounters on sidewalks in the past, without any major issue.
From the article it sounds like the Pennsylvania legislature has already considered the case of delivery robots specifically and decided that they should go on the sidewalk, though to what degree that reflects the popular will is unknown to me.
> but we generally don’t accept someone on a bicycle or someone skating
I see people on rented scooters/bikes on the sidewalk all the time. Society at large seems to absolutely accept this. (note that I'm commenting on the current state of affairs, not what I think ought be the case)
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.
This would have been unthinkable 200 years ago, during a time we are trained to think of as much more barbaric than the present.
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?
It's quite possible (and likely!) for you simultaneously to have an obligation to yield and the other party to have an obligation to not block.
I suppose if the robot literally cannot path around someone standing still, it might be a valid excuse? But as soon as you're actively moving to block it, it is obviously obstruction.
Judges get to run off common sense, not programmer logic - the point of the law is that public paths ought to be usable by anyone for lawful purposes, and currently "delivery robot" is a lawful purpose.
But if she was doing the same thing to humans as she was to the robot, they couldn't move around her (assuming that means re-positioning herself every time they try to go around) - and I think most people would agree that arresting her would be a good thing.
So the next question is, are all users of the sidewalk (as long as they're using it roughly the same way, which is temporary and quick pass through) deserve to have the same rights as a human?
My previous comment doesn't seem to align with this one, but mostly because I'm mixed on this.
If I stand on a train track, do you think the police aren't allowed to ask me to move?
> 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
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 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.
Its not the robot you have less rights than, but the corporation. Cops' job is to do their bidding.
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.
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]
(This also ignores all the fun things about work culture in the USA, like healthcare being tied to your job.)
But I think we should also make deliberate choices to keep humans and human meaning in many things, even if they are less "efficient" by some chosen metric.
Automation and mechanization is desirable to the point that it serves core human wishes and desires-- and through some kind of global/social metric, not that it serve individual humans at the expense of everyone else.
I am saying that I would hate to automate away most joy or most things people find purposeful, even if it increases purpose or joy for some people.
We've already given up a lot of our social fabric recently with tech. I think it makes sense to be conscious and careful to not make it much worse.
It's my guess that delivery bots are a net add to well being.
And I agree it's not immediately obvious, but thinking a little more about second order effects before making a long term durable choice makes sense.
Tech's recent overall track record on impacts to quality of life is not great. And there's a lot of possible ways we can use advances that have different benefits and costs. Falling into them for the long term purely by accident isn't always avoidable, but it doesn't seem desirable.
i.e. it makes sense for society to make a conscious choice about how to trade off different interests for road users and sidewalk users, and to be willing to revise that choice based on experience rather than being stuck with inertia (while avoiding excessive churn and unpredictability).
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
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as incentivizing people to have children because accounting for socioeconomic changes (like birth control and affordability), it’s highly likely that industrial pollutants like heavy metals and endocrine disruptors like BPA are likely the main culprits when even developing countries are seeing low fertility.
It is very hard to disentangle plastic from our food and drink
I can’t see this going well short term. Long term, maybe.
But my point, as I also said in another related comment, is that I think we should vote more often, voting for people representing us is not enough. One size does not fit all.
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"?
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.
Why? You already demonstrated that we are able to acknowledge scooters and wheelchairs. That shows that exceptions can be made. They were made on some basis that is not all or nothing. Likewise we can review the basis here and decide that robots are not allowed or we can decide that robots are allowed.
It’s a collective space and how we collectively allocate it is useful to consider. I’d happily take wider sidewalks if it meant admitting robots for instance.
There’s no reason to believe this is a walk-or-nothing situation. In SF, for instance, children do not need the sidewalk to travel on their bikes but they are permitted to use it.
FWIW I think it is a big assumption on your part that the allowance of delivery robots is a show of “incompetence”. You may not like them but I think a lot of people find them nifty.
From the article it sounds like the Pennsylvania legislature has already considered the case of delivery robots specifically and decided that they should go on the sidewalk, though to what degree that reflects the popular will is unknown to me.
I see people on rented scooters/bikes on the sidewalk all the time. Society at large seems to absolutely accept this. (note that I'm commenting on the current state of affairs, not what I think ought be the case)
Robots owners got big bucks which means power. They need ROI, not sidewalks (also, guess do they use sidewalks or cars?).