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'Our Streets Are Made For People': San Francisco Mulls Ban On Delivery Robots (theguardian.com)
Norman Yee, an American elected official in San Francisco, has recently proposed legislation that would prohibit autonomous delivery robots -- which includes those with a remote human operator -- on public streets in the city. In a statement provided to Recode, Yee said, "our streets and our sidewalks are made for people, not robots." He also worries that many delivery jobs would disappear. The proposed legislation is causing a headache for one high-tech startup in particular. The tech company is called Marble, which uses bots fitted with camera and ultrasonic sensors to deliver small packages and food within a one or two mile radius. The delivery robots themselves travel at a walking pace and use cameras and sensors to avoid pedestrians and navigate pavements. The Guardian reports: San Francisco police commander Robert O'Sullivan is in favor of the legislation, fearing the robots could harm children, the elderly, and those with limited mobility. "If hit by a car, they also have the potential of becoming a deadly projectile," he told a local TV station. Marble CEO Matt Delaney says these fears are unfounded. "We care that our robots are good citizens of the sidewalk," he says. "We've taken a lot of care from the ground up to consider their need to sense and intuit how people are going to react."
This anti-business legislation will kill jobs and hurt the economy. Democrats are up to their usual tricks of opposing businesses at every turn. How typical.
Is the city so progressive they're electing citizens of other countries now?
We must stop the impending automobile revolution. It worry that many buggy whip manufacturing jobs may disappear. In addition, they startle the horses.
I would have never picked San Francisco as one of the starting points for laws specifically discriminating against robots. I'd have expected something like their being the leaders in placing the "R" on LGBTQ.
If they're as hazardous as pets, give them the same requirements. For example a leash, a license, and being accompanied by a human all have precedent. Put it to a vote and solve the issue rather than lamenting potential lost jobs.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I don't know who San Francisco streets are designed for, but it's certainly not people. For one thing, street signs are often hidden or non-existent. For another thing, in places where a "walk/don't walk" sign would make perfect sense, they are often absent.....even in areas with high pedestrian accidents. The street is partly optimized for driving, partly optimized for walking, partly optimized for biking, and partly optimized to being as annoying as possible to outsiders.
The streets of San Francisco are not well designed by any perspective.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
After many, many visits to SF, both walking and biking scores of miles all around the city - I would say the city was actually designed as a kind of massive DARPA challenge to see if someone can design a warbot robust enough to survive the most extreme conditions.
I would say if a robot could last a week wandering around various parts of SF, I would have no problem sending it into Syria or Afghanistan.
P.S. - Robot makers, if you value your product at all please for the love of God make it poop proof. You'll see.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Testing experimental technologies in a public space isn't ethical. Any city that allows it endangers their residents. Cars are licensed for a reason, as are drivers. Sidewalks are for pedestrians. Bicyclists should use bike lanes, or the road itself.
A few decades ago in a column in Analog SF, there was a proposal to model delivery robots after chimpanzees. By adding some artificial vines to the outside of buildings, the robots could climb and swing over head. Having robot entrances to buildings on the 3rd or 4th floor would further ease sidewalk congestion.
We can Make America Great Again by restoring all the labor-intensive, low-productivity, non-thinking jobs.
I hate to say it -- because I'm against the idea of robots barreling around our sidewalks -- but has the city government stopped to ask itself just what problem this startup is trying to solve?
It seems like food delivery is already a well-solved problem ... unless, that is, your city becomes so expensive that no one can afford to live there on the kind of pay you get from a delivery job. Then maybe the robots become necessary.
If you think about it, nobody is going to commute two hours into San Francisco just to drive around delivering food. Wherever they live, I'm sure people eat there, too.
Breakfast served all day!
How dare they call us robots and try to ban us from doing our jobs racists
Last time I was in SFO, I thought it was made for homeless people and human shits.
If you want to make the streets safer, remove the homeless. I've had very few crack addicted robots yell at me for not giving them spare change while trying to get to work. But give it a few decades and I am sure down on their luck robots will be forced out on the street, and SF will offer to ship them to the scrap yard free of charge. Bunch of Technophobic bigots.
San Francisco police commander Robert O'Sullivan is in favor of the legislation, fearing the robots could harm children, the elderly, and those with limited mobility.
That's obvious. Robots, being machines, have no empathy. Like any successful predator, they are going to first target those vulnerable individuals who get separated from the main herd, regardless of the reason.
This has nothing to do with safety; Marble forgot to "take care of the politicians"!
Guarantee Yee and O'Sullivan $1,000,000 each a year for life and they will be your best friends!
Just extortion done the Old San Francisco Way!
i've been there. too many people. delivery bots dont make a diff.
Then you won't be able to distinguish them from the natives.
Delivery robots would help the elderly and handicapped far more than they would hurt. Delivery services make life much easier when you have trouble leaving your home. I'm sure you can imagine how much easier using Amazon is than trying to travel to a couple of different stores when moving is tough. The same is true for food delivery and restaurants, pharmacies and medicines.
This reasoning seems to be simply a justification, not a well thought out and realistic concern.
The entirety of mankind's knowledge is at your fingertips
Wrong. I've done some seriously disturbing shit last weekend and I'll carry the secret to my grave; nobody will ever find out, even with the fastest internets, and I suspect this is not a unique event. This whole fingertips thing is overrated.
lucm, indeed.
Not in our backyard, not in our oh-so-precious City. But the designing, coding for the robot AI is being done by companies around the Bay and Silicon Valley.
Yes to the profits, but let the plebs elsewhere in the country take all the risks during the alpha stage.
... the safety of their own weaponized exploits.
How in simple hell is a delivery company going to farm out responsibility for robots running amok?
Look:
Ca. 1980, the TRS-80 came out with a computerized chess game.
It took me four games to realize that the fucking algorithm was a "look-ahead:"
- Computer moves here, knowing that I would ...
- Move there, and the computer would move yonder
- Knowing I would
I lost every game until I started making random moves (not making this up).
The 4-peep bastard (or bitch as may apply) went batshit crazy and it was like I was playing an 8-year old.
These delivery robots will be assigned points as follows:
1 point for messing with it
2 points for getting it to dance the tango
3 points for capturing that to YouTube
4 points for doing all that without getting caught.
Hey ... I'm 71 now but I used to be 17.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
They don't even pretend there. Half of the major thoroughfares don't have complete sidewalks down their entire lengths. All three major bridges across the river don't have proper crosswalks for pedestrians or bicyclists to safely transit rapidly moving (40-60 mph) on/off ramp traffic, many other streets have steep ditches just off the road without even a shoulder deep enough to contain a broken down/parked car.
San Francisco (having been there!) has a fucking *GLORIOUS* set of streets in comparison. Most of the sidewalks are wider than a lane in Sacramento, there are crosswalks all over the place (even the unsafe ones are safer than many of the sac ones outside of downtown and a few select intesections.)
If you want to complain about how terrible SF streets are, go visit some other areas of the state and see what *REAL* shitty streets look like. Yours are 1st world in comparison.
If one wants to lose then simply fight progress. Just why would one want to protect the jobs of delivery drivers? How about all those jobs that we lost making buggy whips?
My question is: if those things are programmed to avoid pedestrians, when will a new form of street art/sport evolve: getting those things to perform interesting maneuvers?
For example: a figure-eight gives 15 points, a burnout 30, a sommersault 100, or something.
If the performer gets hurt, (s)he can go whine to the police :-)
How about paraplegics with a cargo-wheelchair?
But besides joking, the streets were actually built for horses and buggys, not cars, so ban those.
We must stop the impending automobile revolution. It worry that many buggy whip manufacturing jobs may disappear. In addition, they startle the horses.
It's like that, but will be bigger than that. This is the beginning of the long anti-robot prejudice and protectionism that will be a standard political talking point of the next two centuries.
Real lawyers write in C++
the streets are made for cars. Americans don't walk anywhere unless they have to. Understand?
It is estimated that traffic collisions caused the death of around 60 million people during the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
About million and a half is being killed in traffic accidents each year. Times more are badly wounded. These are the figures of the WW3. This is what going on on our streets.
At the same time the US bureaucracy, which is under influence of an automobile lobby, de-facto sabotages delivery by airborne drones or by robotized vehicles. And these are the solutions which could really free the streets and reduce the death rate on the streets.
As long as they do not venture where it is packed say 1 person in 100sqf
Also the streets would be safer if the bots had a panic alarm or responded to distress.
Allow on the condition that complaints are minimal.
A Marijuana green robot advertising home delivery is not a good thing., nor a robotic Big M or Big Chicken or a Fembot offering S&M. Don't Benda the rules.
The robots had been programmed to refuse tips, using violence
I think he means illegal aliens not robots. Haven't seen too many robot robberies or robot shotguns on the pier yet.
I like the way that The Guardian reminds people that San Francisco is in America. More Slashdot submitters should take a clue from them, and remind people what obscure things are, or where they are, right in the summary.
This should be obvious, but
A) The Roof is accessible on damn near everything. Not all roofing materials are safe to stand on, but for small packages the obvious thing to do would be to create a QR-code type of "landing pad" on flat roofs. If a building (eg a single family house) doesn't have a flat roof, the next obvious is the patio. A little bit harder to navigate, but again most apartments have patio doors, and even single family homes have patios.
B) The next most obvious is to use a "spider web" type of target for the drone to deliver the package.
Eg you drop a net over your patio, window, or whatever, it has a QR code to orient the drone as it arrives, it then clings to the net with the package until you remove the package, and then the drone will release will spin up it's propellers again and release the web net.
Solution B has the unfortunate problem of people will forget to anchor it, and thus the net, package and the drone goes off the side of the building. A work-around to this is simply create a permanently attached anchor that uses vice-grips.
Solution A has the unfortunate problem of not all roofs are accessible. A this would require changes to legal code, bylaws and such to permit delivers to rooftops. Another way of making this more interesting is to have the equivalent of a "dumb waiter" built into apartment buildings lobby-to-roof. So a drone can drop a package on the dumb-waiter, and the dumb-waiter will descend when any weight is dropped on it, sliding it into a bin in the mail-room, so people with a mail key can open the "parcel delivery" bin.
The cheapest, safest, solution however is simply requiring "unit numbers" to be on the patio and let the drone figure out which unit to fly to and leave the package on the patio if nobody comes to the patio door.
... is that it is illegal to drive a plain old RC car on the street.... even if there is no traffic at the time, such as what you may often find in some streets of a quiet suburban neighborhood.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"Out of my way, canner!"
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
> San Francisco police commander Robert O'Sullivan is in favor of the legislation, fearing the robots could harm children, the elderly, and those with limited mobility.
What twisted logic. Children, the elderly and those with limited mobility would use robots to make them mobile.
Being San Francisco, any robot that wears a rainbow flag can do whatever it wants.
Robots will be seen by employers as the labourer that is even CHEAPER than hauling in Mexicans: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... You buy them once, and never pay them... just like slavery.
Sub: Conscious Living index-Human Sensex
Robotic culture needs Regulation and Necessity- wisdom Council
Specify the tasks away from civilian life for the benefit of all humanity and no conflict zones
World peace means stability and not chaotic state promotion.
It's because in dairy country it's fresh.