cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53250107
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.”
Something that takes less energy than a robot, and the communications manufacturing and infrastructure, microprocessor manufacturing and infrastructure, datacenter manufacturing and infrastructure, that handles the orchestration and real-time video beamed halfway around the world to an under paid worker who drives the robot/when it encounters an obstacle:
Walking.
Ideally, the neighborhood would be designed to be walkable, and the things one would otherwise have delivered would be close by. Ideally, one would have the time to walk to get things, for leisure and health, and to interact with people in their community because they aren’t crushed by the pace needed to make a living wage. Ideally, an option would be for a local worker to be paid to walk something over, so the community knows their rights are ensured and a community member is taken care of financially, instead of having a rent seeking conglomerate siphoning money to a top that already has too much money.
The thing about the robot service and who will inevitably own it, is that they would just have the robots run you over if they could. They would create campaigns to deride people who get in the way of the robots that make them money, putting the blame on people subject to them. Just look at how the term “jaywalking” came to be. Look at what really happened with the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit.
The robots could take another path to get around this person, like any other neutral obstacle, and it’s telling that they don’t. They stop short of running you over instead. The person has a right to exist in a public space on public infrastructure meant for people and to stand where they like, it doesn’t matter how many times this has happened to a robot before; the robot can go a different way. By having someone arrested for being in a robot’s way, is the equivalent to running someone over in terms of rights lost. These are vehicles after all, perhaps they should be on the road where they belong.
Yes, very close. It’s the class war, and that is part of how it operates.
These robots were doing this even before AI, underpaid people in other countries were driving these, and may still be; we don’t know, because it’s opaque, and that is the whole point and problem. AI could be driving these, consuming all kinds of energy and causing more climate change, but we don’t know. Just like how practically nobody knows about the insane volume of CO2 the obscenely rich generate. If it were regulated properly, it would no longer be opaque.
Dogmatic opposition to AI isn’t irrational, just from your CO2 concerns alone, let alone economic worry, and now human rights. It should be regulated for all kinds of reasons. Neoliberal policy of under regulating (but not limited to) tech is an enormous problem, I agree.
(State owned) delivery robots make sense once everyone is taken care of, energy is plentiful, and it doesn’t drown the planet in CO2 to get it.