this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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A retired Penn professor has been blocking Uber Eats robots for months. This week, she got arrested for it (www.phillyvoice.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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."

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[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

I think that to trully give urgent delivery services a purpose we need:

  1. 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;
  2. Reclassify the rest as a communal service, mostly on a regular schedule between known clientelle;
  3. 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;
  4. Create an option to offload some delivery task to other community members who live nearby and go this route anyway, probably via some app;
  5. 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.

[–] Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.world 1 points 15 minutes ago

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?

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 1 points 22 minutes ago

i wish there was "quest board" system for small tasks irl :/

[–] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 1 points 46 minutes ago

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.