Another day, another robot doing something superficially amusing but fundamentally stupid and dangerous. In this case, it’s a delivery robot in Chicago innovating itself through the side of a bus shelter—the second such incident this week, this one resulting in a bunch of broken glass everywhere and another flashpoint in an already heated city-wide debate over the use of such robots on the streets.
Look, I’m sure it’s hard to program a robot to recognize a sheet of glass and circumvent it. We’ve all done something like this once in our lives, right? The thing is that if you or I walk into a sheet of safety glass, we bounce off, look embarrassed, dust ourselves off, and resolve to get a better night’s sleep tonight. If you happen to be a small, dense steel nugget, however, what happens is that you plow straight through the glass and into another automation-related snafu.
As per WBEZ Chicago, robots operated by Serve Robotics—the company responsible for this device—“largely drive themselves, with humans stepping in when necessary.” What could possibly go wrong? In this case, “when necessary” seemed to mean “after the damage had been done”, with a company spokesperson saying, “our team responded quickly to clean up, and we’re reviewing what happened to make improvements.”
There’s a world in which robots like this really are the way to “make local delivery safer, more sustainable, and more cost-effective,” which is how Coco Robotics—the other company currently operating robots in Chicago—describes its mission. There’s even a world in which the benefits of technologies like this are shared around, instead of collecting in the hands of a few already-rich investors, while the people whose jobs are automated into oblivion are invited to eat rocks.
But it feels like everyone in this world—or this country, at least—is being treated as an unpaid beta tester for technologies for which they never asked, and from which someone else stands to make a ton of money. The “move fast, break things” approach of tech bros is obnoxious enough when it comes to software, but it’s irresponsible and potentially deadly when it comes to things like cars and delivery robots.
It’s also irresponsible to simply throw up one’s hands and say, “Hey, we just made this because it was cool—we can’t help it if it’s responsible for a whole lot of job losses!” Technology is value-neutral, but the world into which it is released is not, and as long as we live under an economic system that insists on tying a person’s continued existence to their “productivity”—regardless of the utility of what they’re producing—then people will continue to resent technologies that exist to deprive them of their ability to work.
Of course, this point has been made innumerable times before, and as long as Americans insist on seeing responsible government as some sort of existential threat and venerating CEOs as visionaries, precisely nothing will change. We’ll continue to live in a country where a small minority benefits from “innovation”, resulting in the sort of backlash against the most visible avatars of that inequity—incidents like this one, from a few days ago in Philadelphia:
And one day it’ll be you or me who gets flattened by a self-driving taxi/dancing fast foot automaton/googly-eyed delivery wombat droid/etc.—and, hey, at least we have a functioning healthcare system! What? Oh.
English (US) ·