Retired Penn professor arrested for blocking Uber Eats robot
phillyvoice.com
phillyvoice.com
If someone believes strongly enough to inconvenience others, they should be willing to show sincerity by paying fines or spending time in jail.
Just inconveniencing others without feeling some pain yourself is just selfish.
Not saying I disagree in principle, but the protestor assumes a lot of knowledge.
Prescription medications are controlled. If this robot is damaged or destroyed, the patient may not get their insulin at all without further authorization from their doctor or their insurance company. Those logistical issues are much thornier than a retired professor blocking a delivery robot.
But also diabetic hypoglycemia is a thing too, which could be the case for the person ordering. For the sake of argument.
Why insulin? Why not have the robot deliver premature babies from a regional hospital to a central hospital, on a battery powered NICU that only has 30 minutes of battery power?
The argument is unlikely.
Regardless there is a stark difference between medication, which is necessary, and hot prepared meals, which are a luxury.
> Officers approached Marvin after she'd been there "quite a long time," she said. They asked her to step aside and let the robot complete its delivery. When she repeatedly refused, they arrested her for disorderly conduct.
Good. I want delivery robots to be able to operate in public, I don't want people like Marvin to be blocking them because they disapprove of the concept of delivery robots or think it's bad that they're displacing human jobs, and I think that a disorderly conduct arrest is an eminently reasonable response from the criminal justice system.
> 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.
The first amendment doesn't and shouldn't protect interfering with reasonable delivery robot use of the public streets; indeed the law should protect the rights of operators of delivery robots to have their robots deliver items to customers without interference. The criminal justice system should absolutely incarcerate her if she publicly intends to continue interfering with delivery robots.
It's a standoff. She's literally just standing there. She doesn't move out of her way to let the robot pass - but neither does the robot move to let her pass!
So why should she be the only one arrested and incarcerated? Why not arrest the robot for the same crime?
Sidewalks are for humans to walk on, not dedicated travel corridors for commercial robots. If those robots can't play nice and yield to pedestrians, then they don't belong on the sidewalk.
She admitted that her intention was to block the robot and she took actions in furtherance of that, and that she wasn't trying to pass the robot.
Who's to say the robot hasn't been given bad-faith programming to never yield to assert dominance? What if the human had been blind or in a wheelchair, unable to move out of the way?
> Marvin, 78, said she's not sure how many times she's blocked the path of these robots, which hit the streets of Philadelphia in March. The University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus has made a practice of it to protest "corporations that displace human delivery workers in order to enrich their own bottom line." Her past encounters have circulated online. The Wednesday incident was the first time, however, that the police got involved.
is basically accurate.
I don't think the robot has actually been given bad-faith programming to never yield to assert dominance, because I don't think that's something that would be possible to reliably program into present-day robots. I think that the robot is probably programmed to stop moving if it detects an obstacle in front of it, which is only a problem if someone like Marvin who openly states that they have an ideological problem with a corporation using delivery robots deliberately interferes with them on the street.
If a human is blind or in a wheelchair and unable to move, that shouldn't be a crime; but also it should be a reason for people nearby, or perhaps the cops, to help them move, in part so that they stop blocking the sidewalk. And if a person who is blind or in a wheelchair deliberately stays put in the sidewalk blocking it for other peoples' use despite offers to help them move; then they are committing the same kind of crime as Marvin and should be arrested on the same charge.
From what I understand, she just stood in front of it. It would be a different thing entirely if she vandalized it in order to obstruct the delivery, but everything in their power is a stretch.
Depends, did they actually block mail delivery and did they do it on purpose in your hypothetical?
Picket lines that actually block other people from crossing instead of trying to persuade them not to? Yes. Use of threats, physically blocking, or just general impediment? Yes.
Not only does it violate state law (e.g. obstruction of free movement, interference with a business open to the public, false imprisonment, and assault are all offenses here in California depending on the facts), but it also violates NLRA rules.
(e.g. a recent labor case found repeated 1 to 4 minute "inadvertent" blockages unlawful -- https://www.laborrelationslawinsider.com/2018/02/the-nlrb-si...)
The Moscone Act that recognizes picketing federally also makes clear that this is not OK.
> It is not the intent of this section to permit conduct that is unlawful including breach of the peace, disorderly conduct, the unlawful blocking of access or egress to premises where a labor dispute exists, or other similar unlawful activity.
thing is, those all apply to a person. if a person is in the robot then it makes sense. If a person is driving the robot remotely then it gets blurry. If it's autonomous then none of those seem to apply, the robot has no right of free movement.
> 1A says she is free to protest human workers by getting in their way in public.
And the answer is, no, the first amendment does not let you block people and prevent them from proceeding in their work or other activities.
I am not a lawyer but I don't know if the first amendment allows you to block access from others to things. Some things similar to this are covered in this ACLU blog post: https://www.aclu-il.org/news/when-else-can-government-regula....
I dunno about you, but that's not really how I want our society to work.
As other people have point out, the robot could have navigated around the blockage. Just as you could walk away from someone bothering you without getting the police involved lol.
No, my claim is that people who violate public order laws in the public street should be arrested even if they claim that the reason it's important for them to violate those public order laws is because they're protesting something and a protest won't be effective unless it annoys people. I want that to not be an effective defense against getting immediately arrested and physically removed from the scene by cops.
And I do actually want immediate arrest and physical removal to be the default first response in a situation like an effective protest. I do not want people to get away with disrupting the public commons and then claiming that they were justified in doing so because they were carrying out a protest. Indeed, I want the police to immediately arrest and physically remove anyone at all who is disrupting the public commons. The police are a weapon, and I want that weapon used effectively against people who disrupt the public commons, so that the public commons can be usable by everyone.
I don't think that the entirety of the public commons needs 100% uptime. Occasional disruption could happen for any number of reasons like temporary events, construction, and protest [0].
"Immediate" action is such a strange requirement to have. Such a desire seems like a waste of police time. Like in TFA's example , the commons were ever so slightly disrupted: anyone could have gone around the woman. Occasional minor to moderate disruption of the commons for the purposes of free expression is a feature of our society that I think should be maintained.
"I've got a terrible pain in the diodes all down my left side. Life, don't talk to me about life!"
In before "there is a difference between a robot accidentally blocking traffic and this woman blocking the robot intentionally" - No the fuck there isn't. If these robots can't be even circumnavigate a stationary elderly woman, or act reliably then they don't belong on the streets and anyone who put them there is acting criminally and negligently about the risks and harms.
If you simply generally forbid cars from the city (with some exceptions), there would be plenty of room for delivery bots, pedestrians, sidewalk cafes, bicycles, etc.
I don't think that saving delivery jobs is the main issue, these jobs didn't even exist a few years ago and their working conditions are anyway quite bad. It's a bigger social question why deliveries are getting so common nowadays across many countries including also different parts of Europe. I already find delivery scooters unseemly and they often drive recklessly. Ramping up this stuff even more will just lead to more social isolation, and with that conflict and generally low-trust societies.
I wonder if there is some kind of city tax on these robots. You certainly shouldn't be allowed to just put an unlimited number of these things on the sidewalks and push the negative externalities on everyone else. Same way you need permits for drones, which are also a visual pollution and potential constant privacy invasion. Cars on the road are already taxed, not sure about these.
No, it's the state law that permits these robots. The operator obtains a permit from the state and as far as I can tell, if there are any costs they are in the permit itself, not in taxes on each unit.
And what sort of people might that be?
I think autonomous cars will also cause problems because currently if nobody is driving it, it has to stay parked. When it becomes autonomous, you can send it on errands or even to just drive around and try to grab a better parking spot etc. It will mean more humanless cars filling up roads, leading to a feeling of an inhuman ghost town.
I recall visiting Dubai in 2006 or so and remarking to my family at that time of this striking inhumanity of that place. Just automobiles everywhere. One might have imagined one was in the world where Transformers was invented and the humans had arrived as aliens to a machine planet.
The only places that really feel human are those which have people walking around. The cars have high utility in transporting people to those places but having human drivers in large numbers of cars has never made a locality feel non-ghost-town like.
In reality, the illegal e-motorbikes and scooters cause less issues than cars, but they are visible and it's become popular to demonise them, despite them reducing congestion and being far less dangerous in collisions and producing far less pollution (e.g. tyre wear particulates).
The "social question" to explore is about how so many people collectively came to see leaving the house, interacting with others humans, and setting aside work or idle distractions as bad things to be bought off with cash that we had to work to earn.
We know that people like delivery and we know that people don't like the alternatives I mention above, but that wasn't always the case and it's probably worth slowing down to think about what change and whether that might correlate with other concerns.
Suitably cheap labor and the opportunity to hire them has almost never not been available, but industrial-society middle class people who could otherwise afford it long found it to be a luxury to indulge in only occasionally (family pizza night, a cleaning service before the big party, etc) -- not because of unavailability or inaffordability but because class-culture norms acknoweledged it as irresponsible, wasteful, and foolish.
It would be embarrassing largesse to have somebody make a $7 iced coffee and then have somebody else deliver it for another $5. It would be like going to the grocery store in a tuxedo. You might be able to afford it, you might own a tuxedo, but it was just seen as sort of an absurd class theater.
Those norms have changed radically in the last couple decades, and not just on this matter.
And immigrant slave labour has made it all affordable.
I suggest they should be tipped on their back.
This lady has my full support.
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/philadelphia/latest/ph...
It classifies a delivery robot as a pedestrian, so she was impeding pedestrian traffic.
Mebe could design a sort of cattle guard like snare to embed in my driveway that passes humans, but eats hoverboard wheels.
Is it not enough that we've blanketed the country in concrete and asphalt, we've also got to inundate our crosswalks and side walks with thousands of delivery robots and whatever else, and then give them deference? Where the hell are the people supposed to go?
I understand that the ideal human for capitalism is one that sits inside their $6000 a month 10'x10' unipod, never leaves and consumes non-stop, but this is not what I want out of life. I applaud anyone working against these efforts using non-violent protests.
Decide one of them is delivering something, run into each other at the exact same spot, and call the police to resolve it?
Let's continue this process and protest the use of other automation like commercial dishwashers and street sweeping trucks. After all, they are displacing vitally important jobs.
It's only recently that companies like doordash turned it into gig faux contractors.
You couldn't do that to a mute person, an infant or someone's pet, what makes you think it's legal. At least if it was a mute person you could try to claim you didn't know they were a mute, with a robot it's straightforward that you blinded it on purpose because you knew it couldn't respond.
The infants and pets analogy is silly. Are you suggesting that if someone leaves their unattended infant or pet on the public sidewalk, the rest of are simply to skirt and ignore it? Since we can't be sure of the robot's intentions (it's behaving erratically, has it been hacked?), and the owner is nowhere to be found, disabling it seems like the safest thing for everyone, especially if there's automotive traffic nearby and it might wander off-course and cause a crash.
When the police arrested him, six months later for another crime, the prosecutor decided not to pursue my case because of insufficient evidence.
Anecdotal, for sure. But it's no guarantee that it being on video means prosecution.
I mean, I could block a wheelchair user by standing in a cut-out, too. Is that OK?
And in what world is it possibly driving around empty? Where's the owner, crawling around on the floor for fun?
And just to humor your ridiculous argument: yes it’s okay to do that. Stop wasting the little space there actually is for pedestrians with this unnecessary garbage.
If you ask me that thing is an autonomous motor vehicle, and as such belongs on the road and its use of the sidewalk is illegal. Just like it would be if its larger Waymo cousin tried to drive there.
Besides, that robot is also blocking and refusing to go out of the way of the human. There are no laws regulating who has to yield on a sidewalk, so good luck figuring our which one is in the wrong.
> "Pedestrian." Any of the following:
(1) An individual afoot.
(2) An individual with a mobility-related disability on a self-propelled wheelchair or an electrical mobility device operated by and designated for the exclusive use of an individual with a mobility-related disability.
(3) A personal delivery device.
Just because you legislate something doesn't make it true, and the law can be changed at any time.
If I was sick at home, I would be very angry at that professor.