College campuses across the country will no longer be swarming with tiny rolling robots.
Starship Technologies, a leading delivery bot company, announced earlier this month that it was ending its university operations and redeploying over a thousand of its meal machines. But the news is just starting to sink in, as various partnered universities all issue official communications mourning the program’s end like obituaries for a celebrity’s passing.
The time has come for the takeout drones to hit the big leagues, as the company intends to focus on doing deliveries for grocery chains and restaurants in cities instead. And shut-in, no-tipping undergrads from coast to coast weep.
Why would anyone oppose these bots?
They’re an embodiment of the tragedy of the commons. Businesses glut up the public spaces beyond their intended capacity and for unintended uses, then do or pay nothing for the degradation they cause.
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Except the tragedy of the commons was a lie made up by Landlords to justify the enclosure of the commons so that people would be forced to work for them under capitalism, and this is the capitalists ruining the commons.
They block sidewalks, they destroy bus stops, they hurt workers
I had a booth at a craft show on a college campus a few months back. The little bastards kept trying to route through the show and were constantly bumping in to tables. They even knocked over a couple of tables at a few vendor stalls, damaging some of the items.
With all due respect, that sounds like it should and could have been solved in a way other than banning a popular service.
Sure, but even if it could, they probably shouldn’t just keep running in to stuff and routing through areas where there are known collisions. If those are problems they can’t seem to solve, then maybe it’s a product that shouldn’t exist.
This sounds like a real application for Doctrow’s “Chuffie” from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom… scan the “how’s my driving?” QR code on the lid of the bot and downvote… company’s bots gets enough downvotes it gets restricted out of the places it’s receiving the downvotes from.