A few weeks ago, Philadelphia police arrested a 78-year-old woman for standing in front of a delivery robot and refusing to move.
Meet Carolyn Marvin. She’s a retired University of Pennsylvania professor, and apparently she’d been blocking robots for months whenever she happened to encounter one.
She doesn’t damage them. She just stands in their way, as part of an ongoing protest against the idea of replacing human delivery workers (and jobs) with machines.
On October 14, she spotted an Uber Eats robot near Reading Terminal Market and stopped it from proceeding.
Someone called the police; officers told her to get out of the robot’s way. She refused, and so they arrested her for disorderly conduct.
This is a problem. And not to turn this whole newsletter into a giant ongoing list of “Bill-Told-You-Sos,” but:
October 2021: “3 robots.” In which I wrote that I was not especially enamored of the idea of Elon Musk creating a literal army of humanoid Tesla Optimus robots that were roughly the size of UFC champion Conor McGregor, even if he promised they would be “friendly.”
October 2024: “The robot will walk among you.” Fortunately, Musk has this very long history of promising products that don’t actually come to fruition. But by this time, Tesla Optimus prototypes had apparently grown a bit taller, and Musk was predicting they would “babysit your kids, walk your dog ... get the groceries” and yes, “walk among you.”
As I wrote back then: “Imagine what it would be like to have these things walking about in your town, cutting in front of you in the stores you frequent, jockeying for space with people on sidewalks.”
So no, I have not gotten aboard Team Robot in the ensuing years, even if the delivery robots we now see on sidewalks are small and cute, with headlights, little flags, and sometimes faces that look like they’re smiling.
In Chicago, a man named Josh Robertson started a petition after his family had to step aside for a delivery robot. It gathered more than 4,500 signatures.
Researchers observing delivery robots in Seoul have described what they call “robot privilege.”
They watched robots honk at pedestrians to get them to move, but instead move quietly around dogs.
In Pennsylvania, the law technically requires delivery robots, which can be as tall as six feet and weigh as much as 550 pounds without cargo, to “yield the right of way” to pedestrians.
But in Carolyn Marvin’s case, the police arrived and ordered the human being to move.
OK. Historical precedent. A century ago, automobiles started taking over American streets.
Before cars, streets were shared spaces. People walked in them. Children played in them. Horses went through them.
The automobile industry helped popularize the word jaywalking. A jay was a country bumpkin. The point was to make pedestrians look foolish for using streets as they’d always used them.
Eventually, we made room for cars by pushing people out of most of the street. It was an enormous shift in who had the right of way, and now we take it for granted.
(And we got “stroads” like this 1.5-mile stretch in Memphis that the Wall Street Journal called “one of the most dangerous roads in America.”
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
So let’s recap:
Someone who can afford delivery pays a corporation to send a machine through a shared public space.
The corporation gets to avoid paying a human delivery worker.
Even if the law says one thing somewhere, people apparently has to move over and make way.
Remember the cantina scene in the original Star Wars? Where Luke Skywalker walks in with C-3PO and R2-D2, and the bartender tells him the droids aren’t welcome.
I used to side with the droids. But now I understand the bartender.
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Thanks for reading. Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. See you in the comments!
I side with the people engaging in voluntary commerce. Obviously as this becomes more common, which I hope is soon, there will need to be reasonable rules of the road. But it is one thing to make people move aside for robots and another entirely to intentionally block them.
This doesn't seem like a binary choice. As described in the newsletter I would say that the woman was actively engaging as an obstruction. She went out of her own way to be in the way of what someone else is paying for. That is not the same as robots running people over, pushing people aside. Apparently the robot waited - maybe honked or flashed lights, but waited without harming her.
Take into account that the loss of delivery jobs creates new job opportunities. Someone engineered and designed that robot. Someone gets paid to maintain that robot (hardware). Someone will likely get paid to write/run software updates on that robot. Politicians and media folk get to debate and engender anger at the robots.
John Henry was replace by the steam engine - anyone here wish they could be digging holes in mountains with a pick and shovel?