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.”
What is the charge? Blocking a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?!
Looking at the replies to your comment… so many people not getting the reference. 🥲
Lol it’s all good. Enough people did that this is one of my top rated comments 😆
Aaannnnddd then?
Disorderly conduct.
i’m sure most of the luddites here have never used the internet to order a food delivery
like never
but the robot was the last straw
If you can block bots online, why can’t you block them in the physical world?
Because robots in the physical world are legal, and in this case using public sidewalks. Online bots are violating terms of service as defined by the human owners of websites.
Cars and motorcycles aren’t allowed on sidewalks. What makes those robots so special that you think they should be allowed to occupy an already crowded and very definitely human space?
They don’t have to be special, they just have to be allowed, which depends on local laws that restrict their weight, speed, and other things. This whole line of argument misses my point that giving workers a share of the benefits of innovation would be better than treating the innovations as the enemy.
They don’t have to be special, they just have to be allowed, which depends on local laws that restrict their weight, speed, and other things.
This is your opinion and I disagree. They’re free to sort it out with the heavy machinery on the tarmac, though, if and only if they’re taxed as other vehicles are taxed too.
This whole line of argument misses my point that giving workers a share of the benefits of innovation would be better than treating the innovations as the enemy.
We’re talking about uber eats, do you think they will give any worker a share of any benefit? Get real.
Companies will only give workers a share of the benefits of innovation if they’re forced to - a goal I’d rather try to achieve than call it impossible. People have taken your attitude about all sorts of real things - worker safety rules, food quality standards, the right to unionize… even the idea that people would obey lines painted on the road was originally scoffed at. And yet we have them. So get real yourself.
You’re very wrong if you think I’m being defeatist because I enjoy it. I’m just jaded after a lifetime of enduring the apathy of everyone around me. If you’re not like me yet and don’t want to lose that spark, keep fighting. I’m just too tired to do it myself. Good luck.
Sorry you’re so burned out, and I hope something comes along to reignite your passion - there’s always that chance.
You blocking bots ona platform has nothing to do with ToS. Blocking a robot is just standing in front of it, it’s not human. You are allowed to stand on a public sidewalk. If it stops moving because you stand in front if it, how is that illegal?
That’s the kind of bland rationalization an asshole would make for blocking your car into a parking space. The difference is only in the details.
the “detail” is the fact one is a human and one is a robot. That’s a pretty big detail if you ask me
You know… I’m surprised that no one has… Done more? I’m surprised hunting these things isn’t a trend…
I imagine that the non-violent sport of ‘Robot-hassling’ will emerge from pioneers like this before long. Tying a rope around it and to a tree will only be the start, with championships and awards for the simplest, cleverist and most-effective. Getting one to lose it will be high-ranking. There’ll need to be a special section for electronic tricks and traps, and another for reality-shifting. Getting one to forget it’s job and help you with gardening would be one fine example.
Has it been set illegal to disobey “multiple commands” of a privately owned robot?
When police say somebody ignored commands, they mean from them. They don’t get paid to enforce robot commands.
But can they order you to move because you are standing in the way of a robot? Disobeying an order is arrestable, fair enough. Blocking a person is probably illegal (depending on how it’s done). So I’m uncertain of the activity necessary to block such a robot. Just standing straight up an down in front of it sounds legal. Actively and continuously stepping in front of it to block it at least sounds worse. But how do you enforce this? What if a dog blocks or attacks a robot? What are robot/corporations rights?
Police get a lot of leeway when telling people to move. I suspect her blocking the robot, may be considered a public nuisance (like blocking traffic or a sidewalk). Her ingore a lawful command to move = jail.
note: this is not support of the robots, just indicating the fact that they are probably allowed under current laws.
It has nothing to do with robots having rights - which they don’t. It’s about deliberately obstructing what another person is doing. Calling it “just standing straight up an down” doesn’t change that, any more than if you refused to make way for somebody pushing a cumbersome shopping cart. How do you enforce this? Well, in this example the cops tried to tell the woman to move along, and arrested her when she refused. If a dog damages property you can sue the dog owner. If you have more questions please look them up yourself.
Of course it changes that. No where in time or space on earth have there been autonomous deliveries moving about in the same space as you or me. So the interesting philosophical and practical question is “who has the right of way”. And as you say - “deliberately obstructing what another person is doing” when there is no person being obstructed. Someone may if may not be waiting. If I was on the receiving end of that meal, I would expect another drone delivering my food. Just as I expect packages to be rerouted if a delivery truck has a break down.
So the answer is “no one knows right now”. Or to be presice, “no one, and especially not you, knows right now. And I for one will find it interesting when it is solved. Just not from you”.
If you want more answers, please go look them up you yourselves - don’t waste my or others time posting it here.
“I know they’re taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward,” Marvin said.
I mean fuck. Do we want people working as delivery drones? Really? The other post in fuckai about this doesn’t even mention she’s been doing this for month which obscures why she’s been arrested.
And climate change is real you know? A small robot takes little energy compared to a full sized car.
Ideally delivery robots should be state owned and accountable to democratic processes. They are a valuable and useful innovation to solve logistic problems. A way to reshape how neighborhoods are build and planned and make them more energy efficient.
This dogmatic opposition to anything AI is really becoming more and more irrational, less and less grounded in facts and rational arguments. AI needs to be regulated. Like China currently does AI regulations best, but we can’t even imagine things like that any more because people just accept neoliberalism as the new world order and screaming is the only thing left to do apparently instead of demanding regulations or nationalization of certain AI infrastructure. Maybe this is linked to some kind of anti-democracy propaganda campaign. Divide and conquer, and don’t even let talk about regulation enter the public discussion.
I remember all the opposition to Uber as a taxi service back in the day, and the same thing happened with Uber Eats and other food delivery services.
Now we’re taking their side because fuck AI?
And it’s becoming much harder to defend the anti-AI rhetoric we’ve been hearing in recent weeks. Just look at what it’s doing to Sony’s stranglehold on the gaming market. We’re seeing the PS5 get completely jailbroken and games being decompiled in record time.
So which is it, folks? Is it AI slop? Or is it some kind of hero we didn’t know we needed?
Obviously it’s a tool that should be used in service of humanity and responsibly. We need clear goals for a positive future, not a fervent “butlerian jihad”.
This is one of the rare times I’ve heard more than one person say something reasonable about ai.
I am also over it with people who stuff their heads up their asses and declare all ai useless, likely having never done any meaningful reading about the topic. As stated, it is a tool and like all tools it can be used for important work, it can be used for nonsense or it can be weaponized.
Until people collectively understand what it is and that its not going away, getting effective regulation is going to be very difficult.
Until then, it will be the tool of those who understand it, the plaything of the lumpenproletariat and the weapon of the ultra wealthy. If that’s the status quo y’all want, then just keep doing what most of you are doing–nothing.
Except that under capitalism, it will only ever be used to replace humans and benefit capitalists. It’s not that we want people working deliveries, it’s that these companies will roll out the robots with no plans or care for the people who are now jobless. The people who are now added to the unemployed labor pool and competing with every other laborer, driving down wages for everyone.
It would be one thing if we lived in a socialist society that actually cared about service to humanity, then we could treat AI as merely a tool. But in a capitalist world, this tool will have real negative impacts for millions of people.
So call for good AI regulations, and call for end to capitalism. Do a revolution.
But in defense of the worst kind of gig economy delivery jobs? Or completely banning AI? That is wasting any political energy we have. And maybe that is the purpose of fuckai. To divide and paralyze us until it’s too late.
“regulation bad” appears to be just an american thing. everyone else is doing it… but it takes time and is not necessarily done well.
these extreme voices get more head space online because that’s the only thing that can get any meaningful attention nowadays. you won’t see the vast majority of people stuck at “well, some of the things it does are kind of impressive but the practical results are not there for us, i’m not sure why and i don’t understand the impact and background entirely so i just don’t know”. you’ll only ever hear from people that are either “AI evangelists” and are backed up by a huge amount of marketing money and propped by the algorithm or from the people who sound like they are about to fire bomb a data center.
there are many people who are much more sober about these things. look at this video for an example: https://youtu.be/xwXM2pHj0g4
IMO the real problem is that both regulation and the so called “free market” are susceptible to being taken over by players that just don’t play fair. we all know that LLMs and many other tech “improvements” would not be viable if they had to play by the same rules as everyone else (e.g. source training data, resources and energy in a moral way and charge a fair price for the actual measured contribution they provide). but that’s kind of their game, right? they find a way to be more efficient… not necessarily by improving a product but sometimes simply by finding a hole in the rules. and then they haul in the money and use it to put out any competition and poke more holes in the rules.
Afaik self driving delivery robots or robo-taxies is relatively distant from LLMs. Or maybe there will be breakthroughs by merging these two.
But yeah the amount of labor you can actually save by using LLMs is quite small so far. It’ll only get better at that, but maybe there will be a technological wall. But maybe not.
Most of the harm being done right now comes from the AI bubble and crazy high marketing budget that you have to understand is mostly aimed at businesses, presentations where they dazzle and hypnotize the C-suits with magic beans. So AI psychosis is real on both sides of the spectrum.
In that sense fuckai can be seen as a useful distraction from actually talking about either useful regulation (because even that is seen as heresy), discussion about dangers (because LLMs aren’t really intelligent at all it’s heresy too) or capitalism as the root of all evil. And it’s useful to further divide and conquer and create new fault lines within the masses that need to be controlled.
This dogmatic opposition to anything AI is really becoming more and more irrational, less and less grounded in facts and rational arguments.
It’s almost like a religious movement. Like a… jihad. A Butlerian Jihad. If you think RAM prices are high, imagine the price of a Mentat. I’m saving my pennies.
And climate change is real you know? A small robot takes little energy compared to a full sized car.
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.
Maybe this is linked to some kind of anti-democracy […] campaign. Divide and conquer, and don’t even let talk about regulation enter the public discussion.
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.
More important make it fair. Robots or anything with ai has to pay the same amount of taxes as a human.
Isn’t it usually taxed when the company buys a robot? Robots are expensive so the tax is high although it is only upfront. The other taxes that I can see are taxes paid for by the paid crew maintaining the robots (very unlikely that a robot will maintain another robot in today’s time) and taxes paid by the people who buy food through Uber during checkout.
Don’t know about your county but here buying does not come with taxes. All taxes paid are given back. Value added tax. Or what tax are you talking about?
That the company still hires people does not invalidate my claim that currently human labor is more expensive because of the taxes and social contributions.
If your arguments then shift to it does not need to have social contributions because it does not need those. then I would go further. A robot does not need to do anything for humanity and companies can put robot waste directly into the environment. Put pollution’s into the air as it does not need it too.
I think the robot problem is more influential to reduction of factory workers due to robots as manufacturing creates more value. For logistics, people love their free shipping and most of the time, companies pay very little to the delivery staff for cost reduction to achieve the free shipping. In this case, robots might actually be more humane for cheaper deliveries than delivery staff in minimum wage. People get their free shipping while no human becomes a sacrifice for that free shipping. If people really want wages and do not want robots to takeover, people should be willing to pay up for delivery fee which will unlikely happen.
Ideally delivery robots should be state owned and accountable to democratic processes. They are a valuable and useful innovation to solve logistic problems. A way to reshape how neighborhoods are build and planned and make them more energy efficient.
Gig economy. You’re saying that the state(s) should be making all the money and that they should have control over when people can order goods by saying that they should be the owners of the drones.
Currently, the owners of the vehicles are the delivery drivers. Uber, GrubHub, Seamless, DoorDash, Lyft, UberEats and InstaCart, are all outlets for people who have downtime to make extra money and it’s also a great starter job to get experience for a resume.
I think that drones taking jobs is going to push people to disrupt another market and sorry not sorry but fuck anyone who brings up the car thing when you and I know go damn well who ever is reading this uses rideshare services and delivery services. You also got people who don’t drive and use rideshare services and people who use them to cut the cost of getting somewhere if you don’t want to spend money on fuel from traffic in the inner cities.
I think hungry people are going to start stopping these because they have food in them.
What a badass.
“criminal mischief involving a robot”
Sounds like a cool name for an upbeat song by an avant garde electro-jazz group.
it sounds like a opportunity for jury nullification
This is basically the start of the counter to automation. We still tell fables about people who stood againt the devaluation of workers like this.
She was arrested for “disorderly conduct”, for just standing there.
Why wasn’t uber arrested for obstructing this woman’s path with their shitty robot?
ignored “multiple commands”
Broke: “Uber should hire real humans, not robots!”
Woke: “Uber is a complete rip-off with a deceptive pricing model that is doing nothing but fueling obesity rates, regardless. Never use it.”
The comments section on that article truly was a ride.
You weren’t kidding. The amount of confidently incorrect comments in there is astounding.
