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.”
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.
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.
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 about 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.
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”.
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 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.
More important make it fair. Robots or anything with ai has to pay the same amount of taxes as a human.
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 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 I 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.
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.
“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:
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.
that is kind of the problem, userbase is so fragmented and small
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?
It’s replacing a dude on an ebike, not a car
You should dream bigger. We have the technology to not need delivery drivers any more, but you want to keep them? Why? Because you think neoliberal capitalism can’t be replaced with something more just and socialist? That is my charge against this whole critique. Why the fuck do you want people working crappy delivery jobs?
All of this should be replaced by a national post office type of delivery service.
This kid is the difference between idealism and reality.
In an idealist world, automation would fund UBI, which would fund a higher quality of living for everyone. Which is effectively parallel to what you’re arguing here, in it’s fundamental mechanics.
As you can probably see, many Western nations don’t have UBI. Why? Because automation doesn’t give back to the people, automation provides more wealth to a few corporations and individuals.
The same thing goes with delivery robots. It largely benefits the corporation, which can cut additional expenses by not having to pay a human. Where does that money go? It goes to line someone’s coffers. If it was taxed appropriately, then that money could go back into the public, but it doesn’t.
People don’t want to work crappy delivery jobs. They do it out of necessity in order to buy food and pay rent, and the buying of that food and the paying of that rent also increasingly goes to smaller set of large corporations.
That’s the reality.
The reality is that some wacko professor attacking bots on street corners won’t do shit.
I mean yes, but climate change is also a reality and presumably most deliveries are done via car. Or maybe scooter. And for scooter or bike this is also a dangerous job in traffic.
I would also say that it is ideology vs amorality, which is the prevailing system of belief currently in the west, and increasingly so. People do not believe that democracy works any more so you do not see any attempt at demands for regulations any more. That is not realism, that is fatalism.
Liberalism / neoliberalism and the “international liberal order” can (I believe) be understood as a system that only allows capitalism to control government and society, and fundamentally no ideology. Ideology only serves as a facade or shield or distraction but there is no core.
So the hysteria and willingness to abandon reality we see from fuckai (and other recent dividing frameworks) reflect that. Maybe it is even something that is deliberately pushed by the dark enlightenment around Peter Thiel, to erode belief in and functionality of democracy. But that is speculation.
And even Musk understands that we’re going to need UBI the more automation and as demand plummets due to poverty.
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.