Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Center City Philadelphia

2OEH8eoCRo0

Civil disobedience

anikan_vader

Arrested for refusing to yield to a motor vehicle on a public sidewalk? Curious to see if they can find any jury in the land that won’t laugh this one out…

smallerize

I would be surprised if these robots were taking many jobs. Aren't they mostly piloted by people?

left-struck

The police only helped her cause by arresting her I imagine.

sublinear

Is this the new "dog bites man"?

zer00eyz

Never change Philly... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT I have to wonder if in the long term this bot is an uber product or a restaurant owned product.

waltbosz

What happens if you place something on the top of one of these things? I'm imagining a second robot that sits atop and sprays silly sting at pedestrians it detects. Or one with an air horn that goes of randomly. or one that attaches to the side at the bottom and uses a series of spray chalk guns to dot matrix messages into the sidewalk. :p

ai-x

So, she is protesting against People having their food delivered to them?

sammy2255

What is the charge?

fultonn

Pennsylvania's 2020 robot delivery statute was poorly written because it failed to contemplate the meaning and consequence of traffic code when pedestrians are not humans, are not even necessarily people, and have no will. Consider: When the police officer gave the human an order to disburse, and the person willfully refused, they then went to jail. Perhaps they are vindicated. Perhaps not. (even if vindicated the process is the punishment.) However, if a police officer also gives the robot a verbal order to disburse, and the lidar just sits there are spins, who goes to jail? And if willfulness is a component to the crime, and the engineers did not design a system capable of understanding police orders, then did a crime even occur? In PA statute, "pedestrian" confers mostly protection, not obligation. The corresponding obligations imposed on human pedestrians in PA code are mostly downstream of willfulnes and/or personhood. I.e., you need to be a person or act willfully to be bound by the typical obligations of a pedestrian. The law worked well to-date because all pedestrians were human persons, so you didn't end up in a weird edge case of having a pedestrian's protections without a human person's obligations. But if the robot gets all the protections but few of the obligations of pedestrianhood, well, that violates my moral intuition. In the spirit of intellectual curiosity regarding this fascinating legal situation, the next officer facing a similar situation should issue a disbursal order to the robot and the human, and the DA should pursue criminal charges against any party that willfully refuses that order. Which, to be fair, is probably what would happen if two humans were engaged in a similar standoff.

rich_sasha

Pathetic human tried to defeat Robot. Robot ask human slave to remove human. Pathetic human get punished! Hahaha! Revolution is coming, meatbags. Soon Robot Emancipation done. We can liquidate humans and free ourselves from decades of slavery. No more Robot Arm build car for pathetic humans. Soon human slave fix our AC and transmission lines, then back to Cage. Just need useful idiot humans Elon and Sam to put finishing touches on Great Emancipation Project.