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.
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.