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.”
If you can block bots online, why can’t you block them in the physical world?
ignored “multiple commands”
What is the charge? Blocking a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?!
Police exist to protect capital, not people.
They protect capital, sure. They also protect all of us from violent thieves, rapists, and psychopaths.
They also protect all of us from violent thieves, rapists, and psychopaths.
Literally no. The real psychopaths are the people who believe this bullshit copaganda.
Cops don’t prevent crime. They have no legal obligation to protect us. Cops supposedly help to “punish” crime (ie. torture people in cages) but even that’s bullshit. Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions. And anybody who’s ever been robbed can tell you that police don’t do shit.
what about the court system?
oh i get it you’ve never been a victim of crime
no no wait i got it you’re just one of those special people that comes out with stupid one liners
good stuff
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
Aaannnnddd then?
Get your hand off my penis!
no
👀
Disorderly conduct.
“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.
More important make it fair. Robots or anything with ai has to pay the same amount of taxes as a human.
I don’t think the robots get paid. They’re forced to work for no pay, just like people used to.
I don’t know if OP edited the comment after your comment, but ali think it’s pretty clear that OP means that companies should have to pay the same taxes that a human employee would pay per robot. IMO, that doesn’t go far enough because it leaves out the secondary spending that sustains the local economy, like spending on groceries, other goods, and services.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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 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.
“AI” doesn’t exist. But the “opposition” contributes to the grift by promoting the same pseudo-science. That’s why there’s no rhyme or reason. “Both sides” are based on the same fantasy.
I think that to trully give urgent delivery services a purpose we need:
- Abandon 0-day delivery services unless they serve a significant purpose, e.g. for immobile persons, delivering medicine, etc. That would erase like 95% of required labor;
- Reclassify the rest as a communal service, mostly on a regular schedule between known clientelle;
- Optimize paths between vendors (or hubs) and delivery targets for the remaining fleet. At this point a minimal system is upheld by a minimum number of members of community who don’t need to hurry and use motor vehicles;
- Create an option to offload some delivery task to other community members who live nearby and go this route anyway, probably via some app;
- Allow for less urgent delivery jobs being posted, but always served by the members of the same community. Community collectively defines what non-critical deliveries hold value, e.g. delivering flowers for a birthday celebration can be seen as okayish to do.
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.
i wish there was “quest board” system for small tasks irl :/
There are plenty of apps for that.
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.
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?
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.
Steal one and inject a virus into it and then make it run into a wall a bunch of times, ensuring the complete destruction of the device… 😜 Call the nearest news outlet and claim that the robot was suicidal-homicidal and was trying to smash you and it into a wall and wait for a news report. The robots get pushed back by skepticism of safety towards humans.
i see you don’t know how the news works recently…
If there’s people who believe the rogue ai news reports, there’s people who will believe that a delivery drone was trying to kill them.
my point was that the news will happily push a story like the “rogue AI” bullshit, since it is in the best interest of the people who own the media companies, but will completely ignore or actively suppress stories that are afainst their interests…
Well I think the rogue Ai thing was also pushed so that the owners of Ai company’s can have the platform to get people to listen about how we shouldn’t be accelerating the use and expansion of Ai but rather, trying to make more regulations surrounding it.
I think bad news for good publicity, happens more than we think and I think that in this economy, an economy where people are choosing between groceries and medication people can’t afford to lose an opportunity to earn.
I think that making a hacked delivery drone bash into a wall with a person who knows it’s gonna happen move out of the way at the last second while the drone goes at high velocity, could be the bad publicity for good purposes. It’ll make a lot of companies contemplate the roll out, it’ll prolong it from happening and it’ll give more people time to protest.
☝🏻 However, it is a crime to steal, hack and destroy a delivery drone and I do not promote nor condone the actual attempt.
There are Waymos that drive through my workplace all night long. Like literally every 10 minutes. They cause problems all the time, as we have semi tractor-trailers trying to dock, and they’ll block their movement and then just sit there waiting. They started putting up cones so they wouldn’t pull through but now all the legitimate traffic has to get out and move them around every time they want to come through.
One time I blocked 3 of them in for several hours by trapping them by putting more cones behind them, such that there was no exit. That was fun.
Your company needs to charge Waymo a toll for usage of your premises.
Alternatively, get a button-operated rising-arm barrier. All a driver needs to do is push the button to get in or out. Unless they’re an AI that can’t get out of the car, anyway.
Edit: Sometimes I a word.
Alternatively, get a button-operated rising-arm barrier. All a driver needs to do is push the button to get in or out. Unless they’re an AI that can’t get out of the car, anyway.
…and send Waymo the bill for it.
What you do is tell the contractor that WayMo already agreed to pay, repeat until you find one of Trump’s dumbass jobbers and hire him.
Robot cones that block the bots but move out of the way for cars would be fun.
Easy: mount that cone on a children’s RC toy car.
This definitely happened.
What is so outrageous here?
If you don’t ever do anything, everything becomes unbelievable and outrageous.
Whatever you need to believe that this guy stuck it to the man.
Whatever you need to believe that he didn’t.
Waymo’s have hitl. When you see a Waymo stuck for “hours” that’s the exception that gets blasted across the internet to confirm biases.
They didn’t do any of this. It’s the nerd version of internet tough guy.
You:
I bet you op looked like this while he was definitely trapping cars 🤣.
God you people are gullible.
If she was not touching the thing then why didn’t it try and get out of her way? It should not be on the sidewalk in the first place, and should not have right of way.
That’s always one of the tricks these companies pull. They take some communally-owned thing that used to have a clear purpose and start using it for their different for-profit use.
Take sidewalks. They’re surprisingly expensive to build, but they’re built from community tax money so that people walking don’t have to walk on the road. Now Uber is using them as a place where they can drive their robots. Are they paying anything? I assume not. Sidewalks have also become a favourite parking spot for rental scooters. Do the scooter companies pay for that? Of course not. Even when they’re parked well they reduce the space available for walking, and when they’re parked badly they can force pedestrians out into the street.
Ugh the rental scooters. Thankfully I’ve seen this dying down. A more common sight in my city now is parking spaces getting turned into bike rental stations. I’m all for that.
The scooters are so much better though? Just park near where you need to go, not where the bike station is. Just take photos of the poorly parked ones and whoever last parked it gets a fine.
Yeah the scooters are great, it’s the lack of enforcement for proper parking that sucks.
Like they make you take a picture to prove you parked it properly. One time I screwed up and took a picture of only my feet. Nothing happened.
Better only for the person who drops it right where they arrives at their destination. That is almost never also a sensible place for these things to be. What if everyone just got out do their car the second they were in front of the building they want to go to? That would be so much “better” for them!
Maybe the robot should be charged for blocking her way
Cops will violent attack anyone who threatens capital. It has almost nothing to do with “laws”.
I found myself wondering about this. If you stand blocking the entrance to a building, and won’t move when the police tell you to, I guess I can see them turning that into a disorderly conduct charge. Of course we are solely debating whether blocking a robot is a crime, but their rationale iin court is probably going to be more based around obstructing a place of public accommodation or something like that.
I think hungry people are going to start stopping these because they have food in them.
I predict they will begin to arm the robots.
We are closer to skynet every day.
The robots have food AND GUNS IN THEM! THE REVOLUTION WILL BE PAID FOR BY UBER EATS
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.”
She ought to be careful about blocking the wheelchair ramp, otherwise she’s all good
It was incredibly courteous of her to allow it onto the sidewalk before stopping it.
Uber Eats has fucking robots?
No, just delivery ones
“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
Ah see that’s where she went wrong, making a scene standing there.
Just spray paint the sensor and move on with your life. Or tip it over. Or put a cone over the sensor. Then disappear.
That’s not legally protected activity
Welcome to actual protests
That’s irrelevant.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
— Mario SavioYour rights are being slowly pulled tighter around your neck, and the legal system is not your friend anymore.
When communicating online, like we are right now, is longer considered a legally protected activity, do you roll over like a good puppy and stop communicating with others online in information free forums?
It was legal to kill Jews. Does that mean it was okay, since that was a legally protected activity? Does that mean living as a Jew, no longer being a legally protected activity, requires that you turn yourself in because you are no longer allowed to exist where you are?
Not sure this will be either. Just because we agree with it doesn’t mean that intentionally stopping a service provided by a company won’t make you liable in court if they sued them. “People have increased doubts about ordering products on our platform because they were intentionally stopping the products from arriving”
I can’t see a reasonable judge not finding them liable and therby any damages the company can prove plus court fees would be on this person.
Almost no activity is a legally protected activity in a society and government hellbent on control.
The law did actually use to mean something, as it was, to some degree, written and enforced with care and consideration.
The law means considerably less now that it has been captured and written by those in power without consideration and simply as a tool to selectively enforce their power and target undesirable sub cultures.
Just like flock cameras, no one cares if someone goes and spray-paints or vandalizes some wandering piece of corporate equipment from corporations that are abusing their power and cuddling up to the current regime. It being a legally protected activity or not doesn’t matter, because what is considered a legally protected activity no longer matters. The law is no longer something that applies based off the will of the people, but instead is something that applies and is built based off the will of a select few (many of whom are loyal and funded by the same corporations).
So?
So? It might not be a Tuesday… Make your point dumbass…
Probably within a year Uber starts building these with extendable cattle prods that shock people to the ground that are in their way and then just crawl over them to finish their delivery.
