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.
> 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.
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.
"Norms" are not equal throughout the world.
I live in Zürich(but I'm not from here) where the city is not totally dominated by car traffic. They are actively trying to get rid of cars from the city centre.
I frequent the UK. They literally put up BARRIERS around crossings to make it difficult for pedestrians to "jaywalk". I can hardly believe it!
Railings give drivers the feeling that the road belongs to them, so they go faster. Pedestrians have to walk further, or they start climbing over the barriers. I think the UK has been gradually removing these barriers for the last 20 years.
Interesting note ... a 2017 review of 70 London sites where Transport for London removed railings found serious and fatal pedestrian injuries fell 53% in the three years afterwards compared with the three years before.
Pedestrians can cross anywhere in the UK, except motorways. The barriers near crossings is likely to funnel nearby pedestrians to that one spot to cross, rather than spreading out, as it's usually at a traffic light or intersection.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I understood this
> It had no benefit to anyone, brought no attention to what she was upset about
“Stopping in front of the robots, Marvin said, led to productive conversations with other passersby who asked what she was doing.”
> which is moronic anwyays - being mad that robots are taking the "jobs" of DD/UE "workers" is completely misunderstanding the issue
I intentionally did not express an opinion on the merits of her complaints
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.
Your wording implies you are more biased than your introduction is designed to imply. Otherwise, you wouldn't have described what she is doing as only an action against the customer, rather than as an opposition statement to the robots, with the customer's lunch as collateral damage, which would be the more dispassionate description. Nor would you describe her goal as world peace and prosperity.
If you feel bitterly about her actions, then put it into words. Don't hide behind a pretense of appreciating the complexity of the situation.
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.
I'm reminded of how the head of Oregon's DMV once described the legalities of merging onto the highway. "Yielding is the law, merging is what we do." Technically the merging traffic has to yield to the traffic already on the highway, but this does not mean traffic on the highway can block them. In fact, in Oregon we have a law that would make that likely to count as speed racing, a class A infraction. I.e. something you do not want your insurance company to get wind of.
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.
She was explicitly repositioning herself to stay in the way of the robot and prevent it from making forward progress despite its efforts to move around her. She's not just standing there.
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?
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.
> 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
It is a meaningful argument. Talking about the upsides and downsides of things is what constitutes meaningful argument. Loss of jobs is one of the worst downsides there is. That doesn't mean it's automatically not worth the upsides, of course. But it is obviously a "meaningful" argument.
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.
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
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.
I guess I’m more on the side of skaters who I’ve seen get the most hate from pedestrians.
I just don’t like seeing people up in arms because someone says they don’t want a robot on the sidewalk and then the same people make yelling at skaters for doing the same thing. I guess it’s because the robots look cute and don’t need deodorant.
> 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)
I said we, when I shouldn’t because I accept it. But I don’t think the majority of people what sidewalks to become bike lanes. That’s why there’s that distinction.
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...
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.
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).
You know what else will lead to us not getting your cures or space travel? Fully automating enough people such that there are no longer enough jobs in society to do for the majority. That would create a destitute underclass that can never get employed and earn anything to survive, and a tiny elite class that can truly live and afford a fully automated lifestyle, space travel, etc. We are well on track to making this happen within this century. The only way to avoid this is to share some of the value of removing people's jobs with the people it displaced. People doing delivery work are already at jobs of last resort, how do you think "sucks to suck" fares for them as an argument towards removing their livelihood?
Ludditism is not 'a disease', how dehumanizing. It's an expected response. If we did anything towards sharing the profits, it would not exist. If we answered the hard question of "how will a person survive if we permanently cut the number of all jobs in half?", it would not exist. Ludditism for the people being made irrelevant is stepping out of the oncoming train instead of proudly letting yourself be run over to take one for the team so maybe in a few decades' time some of the added value of new automation cancels out the job loss (how it was in the past - and that was when automated jobs still required loads of brand new workers).
How exactly do you propose to share the benefits? Do you think only "billionaires" should distribute their money? If you are middle class American you already are in the 1% or 0.1% worldwide. How much of your money are you distributing to African countries? People clamor for "distribution" until it comes to themselves.
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.
Yes. I would rather have a robot fetch my groceries than an gig-economy worker. Would you really prefer a human sit in traffic with your burger, wasting their unique time on this earth and making a pittance?
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 don't think there's anything dishonest about being in the business of making tools. I am in that business. ...but I can only afford to fund that R&D because I first worked as the software equivalent of a plumber for many years.
Without the ability to own the things I build I never would have been motivated to build them, and without a career ladder I couldn't have worked my way up until I had the funds (and experience) needed to start my own venture.
> 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.
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 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"?
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.
> 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.
Is your position that the outcome is strictly a result of the marketing campaign?
As car ownership increased, it seems possible that norms would change a bit.
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.
"Norms" are not equal throughout the world. I live in Zürich(but I'm not from here) where the city is not totally dominated by car traffic. They are actively trying to get rid of cars from the city centre.
I frequent the UK. They literally put up BARRIERS around crossings to make it difficult for pedestrians to "jaywalk". I can hardly believe it!
Railings give drivers the feeling that the road belongs to them, so they go faster. Pedestrians have to walk further, or they start climbing over the barriers. I think the UK has been gradually removing these barriers for the last 20 years.
Interesting note ... a 2017 review of 70 London sites where Transport for London removed railings found serious and fatal pedestrian injuries fell 53% in the three years afterwards compared with the three years before.
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/pedestrian-railings-removal-repor...
Pedestrians can cross anywhere in the UK, except motorways. The barriers near crossings is likely to funnel nearby pedestrians to that one spot to cross, rather than spreading out, as it's usually at a traffic light or intersection.
Is it your position that these differences are due to marketing?
> As car ownership increased, it seems possible that norms would change a bit.
I remember a time when "internet addiction" was a thing.
Then everyone got smart phones and social media and now you rarely hear about internet addiction anymore.
> Before jaywalking was a thing
... 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.
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.
You have greatly misinterpreted history if you believe this to be the case.
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maybe study the history of the civil rights movement, then we can talk
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.
> 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.
I understood this
> It had no benefit to anyone, brought no attention to what she was upset about
“Stopping in front of the robots, Marvin said, led to productive conversations with other passersby who asked what she was doing.”
> which is moronic anwyays - being mad that robots are taking the "jobs" of DD/UE "workers" is completely misunderstanding the issue
I intentionally did not express an opinion on the merits of her complaints
Sitting quietly at home? Like, not going into work, and possibly negatively affecting GDP?
Unfortunately she had the gall to retire beforehand
The French students form of protest has already yielded concessions.
The "if violence doesn't work, you are not using enough" way.
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.
Ok, why isn't she protesting other machines like bicycles allowed on sidewalks?
She is, they just didn’t mention it in the article.
Ok, at least she is not a hypocrite.
Don’t make me tap the Matt Bors comic.
The set of machines allowed on sidewalks is a very small set. It has nothing to do with participating in soceity or not.
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.
Your wording implies you are more biased than your introduction is designed to imply. Otherwise, you wouldn't have described what she is doing as only an action against the customer, rather than as an opposition statement to the robots, with the customer's lunch as collateral damage, which would be the more dispassionate description. Nor would you describe her goal as world peace and prosperity.
If you feel bitterly about her actions, then put it into words. Don't hide behind a pretense of appreciating the complexity of the situation.
so she should ... post on HN about it instead?
that's how you get people's attention to something, bring about public discourse, which can lead to political action
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.
Sometimes one can feel like your only action is a little one.
I assumed this was an astroturf comment because of how impressively reductive it is, but no, this person has been around for a while.
It is a remarkable commitment to the bit.
It sounds more like she was arrested for not following an order given by the police officer to move out of the way of the robot.
The police do not have unlimited power to order us around.
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?
Just because something must yield to you doesn't mean you have an infinite right to obstruct it.
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'm reminded of how the head of Oregon's DMV once described the legalities of merging onto the highway. "Yielding is the law, merging is what we do." Technically the merging traffic has to yield to the traffic already on the highway, but this does not mean traffic on the highway can block them. In fact, in Oregon we have a law that would make that likely to count as speed racing, a class A infraction. I.e. something you do not want your insurance company to get wind of.
The article includes "she might spend 10 or 15 minutes blocking it, moving as it does, to delay it on its journey".
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.
Is it a lawful order to command a person who is not committing a crime to move from a public sidewalk she has every right to be on?
Police can definitely order you to stop obstructing a public right of way.
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.
> Presumably people could move around her
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.
She was explicitly repositioning herself to stay in the way of the robot and prevent it from making forward progress despite its efforts to move around her. She's not just standing there.
>It's possible they might try to stretch (IMO bogus) "loitering" laws to get her, but doing so would make their intentions crystal clear.
If I stand on a train track, do you think the police aren't allowed to ask me to move?
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?
Presumably it depends on the exact model and when the encounter took place, since I’m sure the devs are constantly working on behavior.
Did he tell her to move off the sidewalk? Or did he tell her to stay where she was and let the robot navigate around her?
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.
The real story hidden somewhere down below
> 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
Many useful things could kill jobs, yes. That's not a meaningful argument in itself.
It is a meaningful argument. Talking about the upsides and downsides of things is what constitutes meaningful argument. Loss of jobs is one of the worst downsides there is. That doesn't mean it's automatically not worth the upsides, of course. But it is obviously a "meaningful" argument.
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.
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
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.
That’s great but are we collectively deciding or is it being decided by a very small group of people?
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.
I guess I’m more on the side of skaters who I’ve seen get the most hate from pedestrians.
I just don’t like seeing people up in arms because someone says they don’t want a robot on the sidewalk and then the same people make yelling at skaters for doing the same thing. I guess it’s because the robots look cute and don’t need deodorant.
> 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)
I said we, when I shouldn’t because I accept it. But I don’t think the majority of people what sidewalks to become bike lanes. That’s why there’s that distinction.
> robots on wheels.
Robots owners got big bucks which means power. They need ROI, not sidewalks (also, guess do they use sidewalks or cars?).
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...
So, she was arrested for disobeying the cops instructions to move out of the way of the robot.
Yes. But when you act in protest, the goal is usually to gain attention.
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.
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.
Tragedy of the pavements on which you used to be able to walk to the Common.
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.)
That's how luddism works, you attack symbols that you can reach, when the root cause is unreachable or even unknown to you.
Ludditism is a civilization ending disease. If we don't control it we will never get cures for major diseases, travel to the stars, etc.
I think we should automate more of deliveries.
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.
I think you're not really hearing my point. I'm not speaking about evaluating things just on the aspect of eliminating jobs.
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.
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).
But at least we get jobs!
You know what else will lead to us not getting your cures or space travel? Fully automating enough people such that there are no longer enough jobs in society to do for the majority. That would create a destitute underclass that can never get employed and earn anything to survive, and a tiny elite class that can truly live and afford a fully automated lifestyle, space travel, etc. We are well on track to making this happen within this century. The only way to avoid this is to share some of the value of removing people's jobs with the people it displaced. People doing delivery work are already at jobs of last resort, how do you think "sucks to suck" fares for them as an argument towards removing their livelihood?
Ludditism is not 'a disease', how dehumanizing. It's an expected response. If we did anything towards sharing the profits, it would not exist. If we answered the hard question of "how will a person survive if we permanently cut the number of all jobs in half?", it would not exist. Ludditism for the people being made irrelevant is stepping out of the oncoming train instead of proudly letting yourself be run over to take one for the team so maybe in a few decades' time some of the added value of new automation cancels out the job loss (how it was in the past - and that was when automated jobs still required loads of brand new workers).
How exactly do you propose to share the benefits? Do you think only "billionaires" should distribute their money? If you are middle class American you already are in the 1% or 0.1% worldwide. How much of your money are you distributing to African countries? People clamor for "distribution" until it comes to themselves.
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.
Yes. I would rather have a robot fetch my groceries than an gig-economy worker. Would you really prefer a human sit in traffic with your burger, wasting their unique time on this earth and making a pittance?
I don't think it's that awful that there be honest labor. There is a great deal of creativity that is not possible without self-sufficiency: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-blue-collar-jobs-of-phil...
What is "honest labor"?
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 don't think there's anything dishonest about being in the business of making tools. I am in that business. ...but I can only afford to fund that R&D because I first worked as the software equivalent of a plumber for many years.
Without the ability to own the things I build I never would have been motivated to build them, and without a career ladder I couldn't have worked my way up until I had the funds (and experience) needed to start my own venture.
I am saying this so called "honest" adjective is made up to falsely glorify certain jobs and insult other jobs.
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Previously on incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112963
> 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
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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
Sorry, the commons are the exclusive domain of private corporate profit, not for humans to occupy.
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.
Should count legally as cars, if someone tries to follow it and block it, the operator could file a harassment or other suitable case.
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.
90% of road space is given the cars. Where was the vote to put cars on the roads?
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.
Is your view that for any task not seen before we must first ask permission or legal clarification before doing it?
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> “I was under the impression that I had more rights than the robot did,” Marvin said, laughing.
Its not the robot you have less rights than, but the corporation. Cops' job is to do their bidding.
What about the recipient of the food, where do they factor in?
Consumer protections have been roundly rejected by the current administration.
What a marvellously ironic name for someone dealing with a recalcitrant robot.
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 fact that her name is actually Marvin is chefs-kiss.
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"?
Too bad we’re living in times where people’s patience is as shallow as their pockets.