Robots have taken over Los Angeles.
It’s not just the AI-generated videos that have caused angst in Hollywood. Our streets are full of driverless Waymo vehicles, covered in more sensors and gadgets than the Batmobile. And our walkways are home to fleets of boxes on wheels, hurrying past pedestrians and navigating outdoor bar-hoppers as the robots deliver smoothies and keto-friendly salads.
And it’s only getting stranger. This month, Serve Robotics, one of the leading companies behind the food-delivery bots, deployed another 500 of them in 40 neighborhoods across the city, up from two neighborhoods in 2023. The other big company, Coco Robotics, founded at UCLA in 2020, has about 300 robots across the city and is looking to expand. Soon a region already known for its lack of walkability will have more obstacles for pedestrians to contend with.
The expansion has sparked consternation in LA and other US cities as residents debate whether our new neighbors are welcome. Neighboring Glendale is considering a moratorium on the bots; Chicago has also limited their expansion. Worse than the sidewalk frustrations, they mean fewer jobs for delivery drivers, even if some are human-controlled.
The reasons related to them occupying sidewalks and whatnot are totally reasonable, but I really hate when something like this is opposed because it will take jobs from delivery drivers. That’s such a backwards way of thinking. “Humans need to work because working is how we make money and we need money to live” Sure, but like… what if we didn’t need money to live? What if the increased ‘free’ labor that things like this provide was just… shared equitably among everyone in the community? What if we had UBI so people didn’t need to work gig economy jobs that could be done by robots?
But no, that’s crazy talk. The orphan crushing machine must keep running at all costs.
Sure it’s a nice idea but in the current system, these robots don’t make life easier for poor people, they just make rich people richer. The luddites smashed looms not because they hated progress but because they needed employment to buy food to eat. Until we solve that, there will be new luddites with every new technology created to displace workers.
This is easily solved by heavily taxing the rich instead of banning innovation.
I agree with you, I just hate that it rarely ever even makes it into the conversation. “We need to regulate this new technology until we pass this other legislation that we are actively working towards which I will now outline” would be far more productive than just “This is bad and we need to ban it.”
Please review the last 100 years of technological development and educate us all on when, exactly, improvements in productivity have resulted in a reduction of the working hours required for subsistence. Extra credit for when it also did not involve threats of bodily or existential harm to the ruling class.
Perhaps, just maybe, people are less concerned with perpetuating the wheels of the machine “at all costs” and more concerned with what happens between now and then. With who will get crushed before they’re stopped, if they ever do, long after our own lifetimes end.
Perhaps it is not the entire world who is stupid while you’re one of a select few intelligent enough to really know what’s going on.
I’m fully in support of the idea of UBI by the way, I just don’t see the hypothetical distant possibility as a reason to discount issues actively occurring in the existent present. Similar arguments are used to defend the acceleration of pollution in pursuit of an AI super intelligence that will supposedly “fix” all the issues we make during the pursuit of it. It’s foolhardy, dangerous, and reckless to leave the problems being built today to be solved by a purely hypothetical future.
I will say, I do like the idea of physically disabled folks getting to drive or co trolls robots/remote cars, especially if they have microphones and stuff.
I’ll look for the video, but there was this really cool Cafe in Japan that employed bed-ridden people to work as robots in a cafe
Here’s the video!
