Arrested for refusing to yield to a motor vehicle on a public sidewalk? Curious to see if they can find any jury in the land that won’t laugh this one out…
No, she was arrested for disobeying police orders. But whether they're lawful orders or not is a different matter; strongly suspect that if this went to trial, she'd have a decent 1st amendment argument, which is why it won't go to trial. (ACAB, but also this is a pretty standard part of civil disobedience -- getting arrested is just part and parcel, for better and worse.)
ACAB & ACAC both span multiple english speaking countries, predate BLM days by at least three or four decades, and are hardly idiotic in the face of documented abuses of power by rotten apples, coupled with tacit acceptance of the bad ones by their wider fraternity.
I don’t know why you think she’d have a 1st amendment case; intentionally obstructing public passages is a crime in PA. Time, use, and manner restrictions are widely understood to be constitutional as long as they are content neutral and do not restrict expression. If she was following behind or in front of the robot with a sign, that would be one thing, but intentionally blocking someone or something almost certainly does not constitute protected speech in itself.
> ignored multiple commands from officers to move.
> She was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
The fact that it was a robot doesn’t really matter. Blocking traffic on a sidewalk and refusing to stop after police intervened was the basis for the charge.
Mobility aids, including motorized ones, are definitely legal on sidewalks. The US doesn’t mess around with accessibility.
When I was younger I was taught that bikes weren’t allowed on the sidewalks, but to my surprise it’s actually been legally allowed in most cities where I’ve lived. There are a lot of wheeled and motorized types of traffic allowed on sidewalks in a lot of cities.
It's questionable whether a robot that's not carrying a human counts. I can't just plonk down a vending machine on the sidewalk and start collecting money with it, and a vending machine is just a sales robot. The fact this other robot is on wheels is beside the point.
The food delivery vehicle was on the pedestrian path where the pedestrian wanted to be. Why didn’t it turn around and go another way? That is what peole do when sidewalks are jammed up by whatever event might be happening. Was she following it around and blocking it from every direction? Making contact in any way? Go back across the street and get on with it.
You might support it if you were a food delivery worker, or someone else whose jobs are at immediate risk from automation. Or if you had any empathy for those people.
A job is bullshit if it's wasting resources duplicating the work of a machine without good reason. Replacing excavators with teams of shovelers would be a bullshit job, but the same job wouldn't have been bullshit before excavators.
These things are pretty big and Philly sidewalks are narrow enough with just regular pedestrian traffic. Incidentally, I’ve only seen these things in relatively high-foot traffic areas too. This is just tech companies seeing what they can get away with, as usual.
What happens if you place something on the top of one of these things? I'm imagining a second robot that sits atop and sprays silly sting at pedestrians it detects. Or one with an air horn that goes of randomly. or one that attaches to the side at the bottom and uses a series of spray chalk guns to dot matrix messages into the sidewalk. :p
the robot will continue to try to get past her as long as it has a charge. when its charge runs out, it will cease. if these robots are anything like instagram users' phones, typically the charge will be less than 20%.
Pennsylvania's 2020 robot delivery statute was poorly written because it failed to contemplate the meaning and consequence of traffic code when pedestrians are not humans, are not even necessarily people, and have no will.
Consider:
When the police officer gave the human an order to disburse, and the person willfully refused, they then went to jail. Perhaps they are vindicated. Perhaps not. (even if vindicated the process is the punishment.)
However, if a police officer also gives the robot a verbal order to disburse, and the lidar just sits there are spins, who goes to jail? And if willfulness is a component to the crime, and the engineers did not design a system capable of understanding police orders, then did a crime even occur?
In PA statute, "pedestrian" confers mostly protection, not obligation. The corresponding obligations imposed on human pedestrians in PA code are mostly downstream of willfulnes and/or personhood. I.e., you need to be a person or act willfully to be bound by the typical obligations of a pedestrian.
The law worked well to-date because all pedestrians were human persons, so you didn't end up in a weird edge case of having a pedestrian's protections without a human person's obligations. But if the robot gets all the protections but few of the obligations of pedestrianhood, well, that violates my moral intuition.
In the spirit of intellectual curiosity regarding this fascinating legal situation, the next officer facing a similar situation should issue a disbursal order to the robot and the human, and the DA should pursue criminal charges against any party that willfully refuses that order. Which, to be fair, is probably what would happen if two humans were engaged in a similar standoff.
Thanks. Tend to post on the train or by voice while doing chores, and usually have time to go back and proofread, but I missed the edit window on this one :(
You know exactly how this will work. If a company steals from you by withholding your wages the police don’t care at all. That’s a contract dispute. You have to hire a lawyer and fight them through the courts. If you steal from your employer then the police come and arrest you. Police aren’t there to protect people. They are there to protect capital. The delivery robots are agents of capital and the police will side with them 100% of the time.
Now that the cops are helping get this news out, would a better approach to the robot be to say, "I'm giving these out for free today," then to put a bag over the camera pod and leave?
2OEH8eoCRo0 | 20 hours ago
scun | 20 hours ago
fsckboy | 19 hours ago
anikan_vader | 20 hours ago
daeken | 20 hours ago
bentobean | 19 hours ago
15feetOfclay | 19 hours ago
peab | 19 hours ago
defrost | 19 hours ago
peab | 9 hours ago
margalabargala | 19 hours ago
throwitaway222 | 19 hours ago
pests | 19 hours ago
> ACAB, an acronym for all cops are bastards
margalabargala | 7 hours ago
15feetOfclay | 19 hours ago
peab | 9 hours ago
tintor | 19 hours ago
derektank | 19 hours ago
chrisweekly | 10 hours ago
zamalek | 19 hours ago
Right: you win arguments against cops in court, not on the street.
Unless you're in your home, and they don't have a warrant.
nativeit | 18 hours ago
chrisweekly | 10 hours ago
(Not endorsing this view, just spelling it out bc I had to look it up.)
Aurornis | 19 hours ago
> ignored multiple commands from officers to move.
> She was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
The fact that it was a robot doesn’t really matter. Blocking traffic on a sidewalk and refusing to stop after police intervened was the basis for the charge.
bdangubic | 19 hours ago
blooalien | 19 hours ago
"Foot traffic" is a thing, and is typically (AFAIK) the only type of "traffic" strictly legal on sidewalks in many (most/all?) places in the USA.
Aurornis | 5 hours ago
When I was younger I was taught that bikes weren’t allowed on the sidewalks, but to my surprise it’s actually been legally allowed in most cities where I’ve lived. There are a lot of wheeled and motorized types of traffic allowed on sidewalks in a lot of cities.
anigbrowl | an hour ago
smallerize | 20 hours ago
wnevets | 20 hours ago
In which country? People normally consider outsourcing to a cheaper country as taking jobs.
majormajor | 19 hours ago
[OP] snarky-comments | 19 hours ago
fsckboy | 19 hours ago
tintor | 19 hours ago
Those kinds of robots should never be allowed on sidewalks.
left-struck | 20 hours ago
jimmaswell | 19 hours ago
nickthegreek | 19 hours ago
UberFly | 17 hours ago
According to the article, yes.
antonvs | 19 hours ago
jimmaswell | 8 hours ago
majorchord | 4 hours ago
jimmaswell | 12 minutes ago
left-struck | 19 hours ago
tuveson | 19 hours ago
sublinear | 19 hours ago
zer00eyz | 19 hours ago
I have to wonder if in the long term this bot is an uber product or a restaurant owned product.
waltbosz | 19 hours ago
ai-x | 19 hours ago
antonvs | 19 hours ago
> ... she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.
sammy2255 | 19 hours ago
tuveson | 19 hours ago
nativeit | 18 hours ago
fsckboy | 19 hours ago
the robot will continue to try to get past her as long as it has a charge. when its charge runs out, it will cease. if these robots are anything like instagram users' phones, typically the charge will be less than 20%.
fultonn | 19 hours ago
Consider:
When the police officer gave the human an order to disburse, and the person willfully refused, they then went to jail. Perhaps they are vindicated. Perhaps not. (even if vindicated the process is the punishment.)
However, if a police officer also gives the robot a verbal order to disburse, and the lidar just sits there are spins, who goes to jail? And if willfulness is a component to the crime, and the engineers did not design a system capable of understanding police orders, then did a crime even occur?
In PA statute, "pedestrian" confers mostly protection, not obligation. The corresponding obligations imposed on human pedestrians in PA code are mostly downstream of willfulnes and/or personhood. I.e., you need to be a person or act willfully to be bound by the typical obligations of a pedestrian.
The law worked well to-date because all pedestrians were human persons, so you didn't end up in a weird edge case of having a pedestrian's protections without a human person's obligations. But if the robot gets all the protections but few of the obligations of pedestrianhood, well, that violates my moral intuition.
In the spirit of intellectual curiosity regarding this fascinating legal situation, the next officer facing a similar situation should issue a disbursal order to the robot and the human, and the DA should pursue criminal charges against any party that willfully refuses that order. Which, to be fair, is probably what would happen if two humans were engaged in a similar standoff.
peri-cl | 14 hours ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disperse#English
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disburse#English
fultonn | 9 hours ago
ghusto | 13 hours ago
em-bee | 9 hours ago
i would just let them stand there like the idiots they are. (unless that happens in the middle of the road)
tstrimple | 5 hours ago
alamortsubite | 6 hours ago