Police confirmed they had responded to a report of “criminal mischief involving a robot” on the 1200 block of Filbert Street around 1:16 p.m. on Wednesday. A woman on the scene ignored “multiple commands” to move, they said, resulting in a criminal violation notice for disorderly conduct.
Uber declined to comment.
Marvin, who plans to contest the charge on the grounds of her First Amendment right to protest, has been undeterred by the arrest. She plans to continue blocking Uber Eats robots and chatting with curious passersby who ask what she’s doing.
“It allows me to talk to people about what’s going on,” she said. “It’s always very interesting conversations that we have, and I think it’s good to have those kinds of conversations in public space.”
Maybe “apples to apples” is a poor choice of words, because you completely misunderstood what I meant by it, which is really the whole point of choosing which words to use. That’s on me, but you did completely misunderstand, so I feel inclined to explain.
When they said, “Corporation-owned robots have more rights than people it seems,” it seemed to me that they were basically saying something obviously incorrect for the humor of it. They never intended to compare actual human rights with apparent robot rights.
By “apples to apples,” I meant, “Let’s actually tangibly compare the rights of a robot in that situation with the rights of a human in the same situation. Not the rights of a robot compared with the idea of diminishing human rights.”
Really, the stupidest part of this in my book is a very bad reaction to my comment that simply stated the plain truth. If a lady on a sidewalk is blocking people in wheelchairs from passing, then that person will likely be arrested as soon as the police can show up, so obviously people have more rights than robots in this situation.
Edit: For clarity, the reason I brought up wheelchairs is that the robot cannot leave the sidewalk, so I wanted the human version of that.