I genuinely hope I never get to a point where this is how I decide to spend my time. What a sad existence.
She says “as a protest against their incursion into public spaces.” and claims “the delivery robots pose a hazard to people with mobility issues.”
Could it be because they should not be using the footpaths?
What is the maximum number of robots that can we actually allow on the footpaths?
At what point will footpaths be considered unusable due to robot traffic?
Could it be because they should not be using the footpaths?
I know some cities have outlawed things like segways and electric scooters from using sidewalks because they’re considered a hazard to pedestrians. Perhaps this explains why I haven’t seen any of these robots in Boston yet…
Can they climb curbs? Can they simply be picked up and put in the street? If they start fucking up traffic, you’ll see changes pretty damn fast.
Why has it taken me so long to hear the term Slop-bowl’s. I love it!
Does that make delivery drones, Slop-birds?
I’m sorry but a robot box delivering my food doesn’t make it “slop,” this isn’t like AI at all. The food isn’t worse, or even colder, it’s just being delivered by a robot instead of an underpaid guy on a bike or in a car. Why are we fighting to maintain an extremely exploitative gig economy and tipping culture at the same time? I thought both were bad? I don’t get it.
Nah actually people like you need to take a walk outside lmao in my opinion. These things suck for foot traffic and take jobs from people who often have no other means of survival at all. They are made by weird tech guys who design them for optimizing profit over everything else which should NOT be the case for what is a vehicle in a street
I literally walk to work every day in an area with a ton of them, they’re less in the way than the average moron abruptly stopping in front of me because they’re more into their phone call than paying attention to the world around them lol.
“Slop” has been slang for food for longer than it has been slang for AI content. You’re deliberately misinterpreting the headline.
“Slop bowls” is deliberately invoking the parallel. Nobody uses the term “slop bowl.”
The proper solution is to properly pay the delivery person. You shouldn’t replace them with a clanker that doubles as a surveillance drone
Serious luddite vibes. These jobs will be lost to automation like so many before them, and we’ll be better off for it.
Anyone i have seen using the word “luddite” so far has proved themselves to be morons of the highest order. They always conflate rejection of technology to fighting to be replaced by our capitalist overlords
The Luddites were the good guys, by the way. They were labor activists fighting back against mass-unemployment in a world that didn’t care what happened to workers who lost their livelihood.
The government response was to make “machine breaking” a capital crime so that they could execute labor activists who dared take direct action.
Declaring yourself anti-Luddite is just taking the side of the capitalists who would murder workers to protect the machines. That’s not a wise side to be taking today if you’re not a billionaire.
Luddite
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/ˈlʌdʌɪt/
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A Luddite is someone who opposes new technology, automation, or the modern information age.
I’m aware of the history and it’s a very apt parallel. At the same time it strikes me as rather futile and misguided to push against progress to save shitty jobs. Worker protections have improved over the 200 years since then, we just need to make sure society keeps moving in the right direction for everyone.
We havnt solved world hunger, income inequality, climate change or so many other human social issues… but yes, a robot to deliever food to the wealthiest folks is going to be the future and help everyone!
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Then they won’t have a job and no one is hiring. Without a planned economy, people are fucked over by automation.
That’s not new. Look at any modern assembly line - should we focus on getting more humans back in there so they can do mind-numbing work eight hours a day?
We obviously need to put a lot of effort into making society work for everyone. But sticking your head in the sand and refusing progress is counterproductive.
We should focus on planning the economy, and until we can do that, we need to let people keep their jobs.
The weavers had to be suppressed with the military when the autolooms came for their jobs, now imagine if that’s every job in every sector in every country all at the same time. There is a tipping point where job losses outpace job creation, and then unemployable people start picking up guns.
Serious luddite vibes.
Found the cog-sucker.
Dumb fucks like you love to just roll over and let these Big Brother drones eventually track everyone’s movements via facial recognition and use the info to throw dissenters into camps
Sure, the delivery bots are the lynchpin in our dystopian surveillance future. If only we could stop them, then nothing else would track us.
For one it’s a big box blocking the road for people and there will not be few of them.
But the ubereats guy is whizzing along footpaths as quick as he dares on an electric bike because hes gotta get back to make more deliveries to survive.
I live in a tiny town where that doesnt happen, but whenever I go into my local Big City I’m always dodging them, terrified.
Except they don’t block the road. I live and work in an area with a ton of these things all the time. They usually are annoyingly cautious not to block the road, leading to them sometimes sitting at crosswalks for several cycles. That’s just not true. They don’t even really block the sidewalks even though there are a ton of them.
I mean in one sense I get it but in another sense what a weird hill to have chosen.
Of all the things and ways to protest, how is stopping me from getting my burger really helping? It’s not even as if I ordered it from an AI company, it’s from a local burger place.
Thing is that delivery robots are quite an efficient way to get stuff moved. Getting a robot delivery from a store is better for the environment than driving there.
Anywhere that can use robots can use cyclists which are better than robots in that regard.
Yes, what an absolutely asinine thing to “protest” over and trying to tie it to being against AI is cheap and disingenuous. “Not the poor DoorDashers!!!”
Some people just need their windmills…
I think that’s a reasonable reaction to the further encroachment of robots into parts of life where they didn’t exist before.
I’ll also say that if they decorated those things in a way that didn’t make us feel like we’re living in the WALL-E universe, I’d feel a tad bit better about it. Like, make it steampunk or something.
Hot gluing gears onto the robots will surely work wonders on public acceptance.
A nice top hat and curly mustache would really subdue the threatening vibes.
“Motor intimidation”
What a stupid hill to die on. Robots in service fields are inevitable. It’s not about AI stealing jobs, either. It’s about technology being used to do the work of humans…which has been occurring since the industrial revolution.
Sidewalks are for humans. If standing in front of a robot is a crime, it’s a crime we ought to be breaking routinely until the laws change.
Nothing but respect for the people standing up to keep human spaces human.
And, I don’t know how anyone could be so delusional as to think that delivery robots aren’t intended to replace human jobs. What else are they for?
I’m wonder why she doesn’t just gift them little hats.
I wonder what would happen if you covered up the lidar. Seems like it would stop doing whatever it was doing and ask for human assistance. Seems like the lidar would fit nicely under a to-go bowl, maybe a large soda cup.
This is a really tough one to decide where to side. On the one hand, its first amendment rights and on the other, its the rights of corporations via robots. I’m so torn on this issue.
Do delivery robots belong on the sidewalk?
Good question. I’d say based on speed and risk. If they go as fast as a walking person and won’t bump people, upset the flow or get in the way, sidewalk is OK (to a limit, you can’t have hundreds of these things zooming all over.) If they are slow and on the street or bike lane, they’re likely to cause problems. I’ve heard some people say that companies need to pay to widen the sidewalk to accommodate these things, but that’s a whole different problem
Definitely not. Look at the short video in the article, and imagine there are dozens of those things, which will inevitably happen if this kind of thing ramps up, which is surely what the corporation who’s running these things wants. There would be no way to safely walk down the sidewalk, and people would be forced to walk in the street to get around them.
Can apply the same principle for mobility scooters.
Yeah, fuck those people with movement disorders and their spinal and neurological disabilities, they should get back in the hospital bed where they belong. /s
To be fair if there are dozens of these things on the sidewalk then that means traffic is much better and the road can be cannibalized to increase the area available. Assuming the government acts fairly and promptly (hah, as if), this is a win for everyone involved.
if there are dozens of these things on the sidewalk then that means traffic is much better
That’s a stretch. There could still be plenty of car traffic while still having sidewalks filled with bots
No. Why would you possibly think that? Traffic would not get better.
I’m guessing because one of these means a 5-8 passenger internal combustion vehicle is not on the roads, but we all know pedestrians will never get that real estate back.
No!
Where do they belong, then?
The road! It’s got 4 wheels and motors. Or we could think about how we’ve designed urban spaces that surrender all space to cars forcing everyone not in a car can get fucked, so maybe take one car lane away and make a new bike/ delivery bot lane.
I have news for you about some wheelchairs
Well unluckily we don’t have any special exceptions for people with disabilities, so this means I’m forced to double down and say wheelchair users also belong on the road, IF their wheelchair is electrified.
My argument is still that more space should be taken from driving and parking lanes rather than turning pedestrian areas into the dumping ground for anything that’s not a car, overcrowding it.
Except they’re not road fit.
They can’t go at appropriate speeds (IIRC most of these go at best 10mph)
They’re small and low - visibility within city level follow distance is impossible
Overall, everyone’s safer if they stay on the pavement.
Well yeah that’s why they go on bike lanes.
Oh yeah, them moving suddenly into the way of a cyclist will end well.
These things are pretty much exclusively used on college campuses and downtown areas
I’m not sure I see your point, unless you’re assuming college campuses and downtown cores aren’t still heavily car based in the US? I assure you most of them have a road or parking lane to spare near the restaurants that the bots want to pick up from
Honestly, have them share a bus lane, or expand bike lanes into a secondary lane for delivery robots. Make it on the outside though, so there’s a buffer for cyclists.
I already hate sharing a sidewalk with them, I would shit blood if one of these fuckers made me late for a bus transfer because it was doing something stupid in the shared lane.
No
She found a way to get attention.
