Technology

I'm all for delivery robots. The idea of having people in gas guzzling cars taking up huge amounts of city space while polluting, just so you can have a private taxi for your burrito is crazy. The main issue here is them taking up sidewalk infrastructure instead of car infrastructure. Fix that and we've got absolutely no problems. Tiny electric vehicles SHOULD be delivering things. Fixing this infrastructure problem is another great time to fix deliveries in general blocking side lanes, bike lanes, and slowing traffic where it does actually need to flow.

While we're at it, fix all traffic. Switch to a modified Dutch design of three types of roads (highways, distributor roads, and access roads) to further eliminate car interactions with pedestrians, cyclist, and yes probably small bot interactions. They should only be mixing on access roads. Dedicated and separated car lanes, bike lanes, and walking paths, and shared delivery lanes for bots and manned cars on access roads. It'll take time, but a simple plan and slow progress will eventually fix things and cause less havoc like adding cars did to cities that were all horse based.

In Atlanta last year, I watched one of these turning in tight circles for a couple minutes before I got bored and moved on. At least it wasn’t in the street.

Memes aside, my friends and I genuinely would have murdered these things with rocks had they come out before we'd turned 18.

If a human courier walked at me and wanted to go through me, I'm allowed to push them away. A robot doesn't have more rights than a person. Not likely to happen to me with a robto where I live though.

To be fair, the delivery robots I've seen (made by Yandex, which is known for bleeding-edge developments in self-driving technology) made good job to be as unobtrusive and predictable as possible, while also avoiding humans in quite a large range.

My only issue with them is that these are camera-equipped devices rolling the streets and likely sending all that footage to their Big Tech daddies. Besides that, they do their job well, reducing the need for hard human labor.

What law would I potentially break if I tipped one over?

I've never seen one IRL where I live, they wouldn't make much sense in suburbia, but I suppose I might come across one someday, if they keep multiplying.

The technology has emerged before the infrastructure.

This is a fairly generic complaint that humans have had for 1000s of years.

I wouldn't worry about it.

A lot of sidewalks in major cities don't have room for these. Especially if you account for traffic, light, and power poles, street signs, bus and trolley stops, subway and El entrances, sidewalk trees, garbage, trash and recycling bins, sidewalk grates, cellar entries, cracked sidewalks, etc, etc, etc. And suddenly you're being asked to give up one piece of space that's supposedly reserved for you, to yet another 'move fast, break things, get permission later' techbro "innovation" that no one's asked for.

There's no regulation over them, no standards that they have to follow or how to behave, no way for the public to specifically identify a robot when they encounter it in public (like, say, your robot ran into my car or whatever).

I'd only allow them if each robot carried a certain amount of insurance, was registered and had some kind of license plate, had turn signals (I don't know if they do, the ones I saw didn't), had limited operating hours and locations, were forced to move aside for humans, etc - basically make them the absolute lowest priority thing on the streets and sidewalks. Streets, bike lanes, sidewalks, subways, etc, were each built for specific forms of human movement. If techbros want to introduce a new type of system, they should be forced to build their own infrastructure to support it (no idea what that looks like for delivery robots), instead of just blatantly overloading already-stressed public infrastructure.

If you see one chuck it in the river

If one of these bumped into me I feel like I'd want to tip it over in response.

Fuck you botly, I'm going clankertipping

This is just one of many, many pieces of technology that have been just put into public from tech companies whether we like it or now. And they do it because they know there is no regulation, nor will there be anytime soon to reign it in.

No wonder. The roads are not built for these things and nobody expects them there.

"broken-down robots causing obstructions"

It's littering. Call the sanitation department.