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.”
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.
More important make it fair. Robots or anything with ai has to pay the same amount of taxes as a human.
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.
I think that to trully give urgent delivery services a purpose we need:
Fetch quests, when optimized, provide some persons with meaningful labor that keeps up their physique, and their, and then others’ involvement ties the community together and makes personal connections between people in it. Drones navigating the sidewalks humans use are irrelevant if the amount of labor needed is not overwhelming to begin with, and doesn’t need to be optimized by producing expensive robots and computer vision models.
or like someone sets a ride, you accept , you pick them up, drop them off, collect pay and move on to the next person… file taxes at the end of the month… make a federal minimum and rely on deliveries to make up the rest like servers/waiters who make the majority of their paycheck based on tips… make it so anyone anywhere with a car and clean driving background can do the job as long as they’re over a certain age and have a license and a car to use…
Maybe we just like make it make sense and leave them all as gig economy services that people can make money from…
Like maybe we just leave it the fuck alone and take drones out of the equation?
i wish there was “quest board” system for small tasks irl :/
Those are some very interesting ideas! I’d love to see this for city planning. Maybe China lol. The “Urban planning in communist states” had similar benefits but our current technology e.g. just smartphone apps could also help or optimize or solve a lot of these issues for free.
But I don’t think these robots actually need to be expensive. I believe a local model on a smartphone could basically do this already and then you just have an RC car with a different gearing and a box. Like if a country had state owned facilities with regular open optimization challenges this would cost basically nothing.
A lot of things should be rethought. And thanks to climate change and migration we will have to build a lot of cities.
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.
It’s replacing a dude on an ebike, not a car
You should dream bigger. We have the technology to not need delivery drivers any more, but you want to keep them? Why? Because you think neoliberal capitalism can’t be replaced with something more just and socialist? That is my charge against this whole critique. Why the fuck do you want people working crappy delivery jobs?
All of this should be replaced by a national post office type of delivery service.
This kid is the difference between idealism and reality.
In an idealist world, automation would fund UBI, which would fund a higher quality of living for everyone. Which is effectively parallel to what you’re arguing here, in it’s fundamental mechanics.
As you can probably see, many Western nations don’t have UBI. Why? Because automation doesn’t give back to the people, automation provides more wealth to a few corporations and individuals.
The same thing goes with delivery robots. It largely benefits the corporation, which can cut additional expenses by not having to pay a human. Where does that money go? It goes to line someone’s coffers. If it was taxed appropriately, then that money could go back into the public, but it doesn’t.
People don’t want to work crappy delivery jobs. They do it out of necessity in order to buy food and pay rent, and the buying of that food and the paying of that rent also increasingly goes to smaller set of large corporations.
That’s the reality.
I mean yes, but climate change is also a reality and presumably most deliveries are done via car. Or maybe scooter. And for scooter or bike this is also a dangerous job in traffic.
I would also say that it is ideology vs amorality, which is the prevailing system of belief currently in the west, and increasingly so. People do not believe that democracy works any more so you do not see any attempt at demands for regulations any more. That is not realism, that is fatalism.
Liberalism / neoliberalism and the “international liberal order” can (I believe) be understood as a system that only allows capitalism to control government and society, and fundamentally no ideology. Ideology only serves as a facade or shield or distraction but there is no core.
So the hysteria and willingness to abandon reality we see from fuckai (and other recent dividing frameworks) reflect that. Maybe it is even something that is deliberately pushed by the dark enlightenment around Peter Thiel, to erode belief in and functionality of democracy. But that is speculation.
And even Musk understands that we’re going to need UBI the more automation and as demand plummets due to poverty.