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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."
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
But pizza delivery robots will save lives!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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!
Last time I was in SFO, I thought it was made for homeless people and human shits.
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.
Worried about robots harming the children and elderly? Stop worrying! Just buy Old Glory robot insurance, and you're covered.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So you want to murder the homeless, eh?
Politics in San Francisco is radioactive. Blaming it on a party is cute.
Really, if they want to say that "our streets are made for people," they should ban cars and allow robots.
Isn't that the goal of every business?
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.
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.
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.
Why don't we make a law that nobody can drive their own car. Instead you
must hire certified driving specialist to drive you. My plan would create millions of jobs.
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?
Some jurisdictions in the US have laws like that about pumping your own gas. Supposedly due to safety concerns.
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++
Great idea!
Of course, electricity is very dangerous, too. We need qualified attendants at recharge stations to perform the actual connection-charge-disconnection procedures for safety's sake. Hey! I know! We can employ all those unemployed STEM graduates as "certified automobile recharging engineers"!
Somebody call the White House!!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
Politics in San Francisco is radioactive. Blaming it on a party is cute.
Well, when there haven't been any *other* parties with any real power in charge and responsible for their failed and failing policies, laws, and initiatives for decades, it's rather unavoidable.
Or are you blaming the minority party for not changing things because they are in the minority? Help me out here, as it's nearly impossible to guess what a Leftist is thinking due to logic not being part of the process.
Not explicitly, but "reducing labor costs" certainly is. And a good thing, too, or we'd all be subsistence farmers.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah, we all make fun of Jersey until it's 10 degrees out and everyone is sitting in their warm car in NJ while the rest of us are standing in the cold.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I see that non-discrete logic isn't your thing.
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'
It gets that cold where you live??? How can you live there????
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Out of my way, canner!"
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
When the minimum wage in San Francisco is $15/hour, many delivery jobs simply don't provide sufficient value to sustain the position.
A robot is a one-time sunk cost. plus maintenance and charging. But certainly less than wages and mandated benefits and employer contributions. The business can continue delivering food, and make a profit.
Ban robots. . . and the delivery jobs will not come back, delivery will, for the most part, end. Certainly, high-end "gourmet" delivery will be sustainable, but that's a small fraction of the overall delivery business. Most places will simply shut down, raising unemployment and cutting choice.
Why this isn't obvious, evades me. . .
> 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.
Context, New Jersey. That's Fahrenheit. I could live in Wisconsin or something where it regularly goes below zero and which scale you use no longer matters - but not many people choose to do that.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My main processor is thousands of hand-wire-wrapped transistors on a table-sized circuit board.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Sounds cold. I remember last winter I worse some sweatshirts a lot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My main processor is thousands of hand-wire-wrapped transistors on a table-sized circuit board.
Hah!
In 1975/6 our HS vocational electronics class built a basic computer with a 12-inch amber monitor, mostly using 7400-series 14-pin DIP logic I.C.s in sockets with wire-wrap terminals mounted on perforated board, and connected together with wire-wrap using a special little hand tool to make the turns uniform and with the right amount of tension gripping the terminal post.
We all had to learn how to use this hand wire-wrapping tool, as at the time, that had been a standard wiring method for electronic digital circuit prototyping. What a PITA!! Never had to touch one in the decades in the electronics industry since that class, as PCBs came into near-universal use just around then, LOL!
Ah, teenage carpal-tunnel from wire-wrapping!
Good times, good times!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Ah, teenage carpal-tunnel from wire-wrapping!
You could say I was among the first "teenage carpal-tunnel ninjas"! :D
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If you are anywhere except the west coast in the US, there's no such thing as a perfect climate. And then you have other nasties to deal with like rain for 6 straight months (Portland), block-to-block and hour-to-hour 15-degree weather shifts (SF), filthy air (LA), or climate perfection but total affordability fail (San Diego). And lets not get into wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides, and the like.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oh yeah, keep talking, your jealousy is showing :)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you can afford a nice place in San Diego, I'm legit jealous.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The irony is delicious. More often than not, these tech people happen to be infra-Leftists who have a fetish for living/working in places like San Francisco. Then the moonbats of San Francisco have a problem w/ them using robots to deliver goods or services. Had they simply done their thing in other cities, like Phoenix or Atlanta, they'd have been fine. But no, they have to do it in the great city by the Bay.
Honestly, I'm not remotely sympathetic to companies like Yelp! who set up shop near Market Street, and then have to face moonbats pissed off @ them for using robots. In fact, the sooner they go out of business, the better: that will be a salutary lesson to people to start their dream companies outside the Left Coast
I somehow thought that San Francisco was evenly split b/w the Dems & the Greens, and that it is a 2 party system out there.
In case you missed it, the elections for Barbara Boxer's Senate seat last year was b/w 2 Dems: that's how Leftist that state is!
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.