cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53250107
Police confirmed they had responded to a report of “criminal mischief involving a robot” on the 1200 block of Filbert Street around 1:16 p.m. on Wednesday. A woman on the scene ignored “multiple commands” to move, they said, resulting in a criminal violation notice for disorderly conduct.
Uber declined to comment.
Marvin, who plans to contest the charge on the grounds of her First Amendment right to protest, has been undeterred by the arrest. She plans to continue blocking Uber Eats robots and chatting with curious passersby who ask what she’s doing.
“It allows me to talk to people about what’s going on,” she said. “It’s always very interesting conversations that we have, and I think it’s good to have those kinds of conversations in public space.”
Uber Eats has fucking robots?
Now where did I put my taser. /s
It really pisses me off how pristine and undamaged that piece of shit looks.
Kinda ironic for a Marvin to block a robot…
I think Marvin would appreciate the sentiment.
I reckon Marvin would find a downside to it.
He would, but we know deep inside he would like it.
I think hungry people are going to start stopping these because they have food in them.
I predict they will begin to arm the robots.
We are closer to skynet every day.
The robots have food AND GUNS IN THEM! THE REVOLUTION WILL BE PAID FOR BY UBER EATS
More RoboCop than Skynet.
Ah see that’s where she went wrong, making a scene standing there.
Just spray paint the sensor and move on with your life. Or tip it over. Or put a cone over the sensor. Then disappear.
That’s not legally protected activity
Welcome to actual protests
That’s irrelevant.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
— Mario SavioSo?
Not sure this will be either. Just because we agree with it doesn’t mean that intentionally stopping a service provided by a company won’t make you liable in court if they sued them. “People have increased doubts about ordering products on our platform because they were intentionally stopping the products from arriving”
I can’t see a reasonable judge not finding them liable and therby any damages the company can prove plus court fees would be on this person.
“criminal mischief involving a robot”
Sounds like a cool name for an upbeat song by an avant garde electro-jazz group.
it sounds like a opportunity for jury nullification
She was arrested for “disorderly conduct”, for just standing there.
After looking at the Philadelphia statute for disorderly conduct I’m assuming it’s based off this:
Obstructing a Highway or other Public Passage. No person shall, without legal privilege to do so, intentionally or recklessly obstruct a highway, sidewalk, or other public passage.
I want to know WHO was she obstructing? Sidewalks are for people. Are the cops going to make sure stray animals have full access as well?
Anyone trying to navigate that section of the sidewalk.
It’s still bullshit, and it’s still a first amendment issue as it is a form of protest.
But standing somewhere, blocking a public space is obstructing the flow of traffic, and meets the standard. Being arrested is part and parcel of protest because legal challenges form precedent. Sometimes you want to be arrested for both visibility and that opportunity to challenge a law, or otherwise shift things.
Blocking the robot isn’t the same as blocking a human. But blocking robot did block other humans. They had to navigate around it. Rubbernecking is inevitable. You’ve got the people interested in what she’s doing and why standing there too. In terms of whether or not she violated that law, there’s zero doubt she did.
And that’s part of the process of changing that law, hopefully
Step aside HUMAN!
What is the charge? Blocking a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?!
This. Is. Democracy. Manifest!
Police exist to protect capital, not people.
Aaannnnddd then?
Get your hand off my penis!
No and then!
Can I get a shrimp fried rice?
Annnnd theeeeennnn?
NO AND THEN
👀
Disorderly conduct.
That is the crime she was arrested for? Not yielding to a clanker using the sidewalk? Wow, what a joke.
The police arrest protesters for refusing to move on all the time.
You can fight it in court
She ought to be careful about blocking the wheelchair ramp, otherwise she’s all good
It was incredibly courteous of her to allow it onto the sidewalk before stopping it.
There are Waymos that drive through my workplace all night long. Like literally every 10 minutes. They cause problems all the time, as we have semi tractor-trailers trying to dock, and they’ll block their movement and then just sit there waiting. They started putting up cones so they wouldn’t pull through but now all the legitimate traffic has to get out and move them around every time they want to come through.
One time I blocked 3 of them in for several hours by trapping them by putting more cones behind them, such that there was no exit. That was fun.
Your company needs to charge Waymo a toll for usage of your premises.
Alternatively, get a button-operated rising-arm barrier. All a driver needs to do is push the button to get in or out. Unless they’re an AI that can’t get out of the car, anyway.
Edit: Sometimes I a word.
Alternatively, get a button-operated rising-arm barrier. All a driver needs to do is push the button to get in or out. Unless they’re an AI that can’t get out of the car, anyway.
…and send Waymo the bill for it.
What you do is tell the contractor that WayMo already agreed to pay, repeat until you find one of Trump’s dumbass jobbers and hire him.
Robot cones that block the bots but move out of the way for cars would be fun.
Narrator: Little did @Acid_Burn know that his innocent comment would kick off The Great Robot War and subsequent collapse of civilization.
You missed a thorn opportunity for “that”
Easy: mount that cone on a children’s RC toy car.
This definitely happened.
It’s really not that hard to believe. Waymo will use any available roads to navigate between fares, and it can become especially bad when they’re waiting for fares. Because they don’t just return to a home parking spot and wait between fares. The point is that they want to spread their potential reach (and ensure there are cars nearby regardless of where they’re requested) so they spread out until they need to return to charge/refuel.
They cruise around random backroads and residential areas until a fare requests them. They also avoid U-turns whenever possible, which means they’ll often path through some interesting places just to avoid turning around. They quickly clog residential roads when fares are slow, by all driving in a holding pattern around residential areas that aren’t designed for that kind of through traffic.
Yeah they also have human intervention which kicks most cases far before this could happen but I’m sure this random internet commenter definitely trapped a bunch with cones and held them hostage🤣
Human intervention only automatically kicks in when the car actually thinks it is trapped. Which can easily take a while for larger parking lots.
Also, it’s not a stretch to assume Waymo cuts costs by not having 1:1 coverage of humans to cars and that they triage which cars actually need humans.
👍 definitely happened. In a small internet space you found the edge case. They won’t have video or any evidence but they definitely trapped some Waymo’s
What is so outrageous here?
If you don’t ever do anything, everything becomes unbelievable and outrageous.
Whatever you need to believe that this guy stuck it to the man.
Waymo’s have hitl. When you see a Waymo stuck for “hours” that’s the exception that gets blasted across the internet to confirm biases.
They didn’t do any of this. It’s the nerd version of internet tough guy.
You:
If she was not touching the thing then why didn’t it try and get out of her way? It should not be on the sidewalk in the first place, and should not have right of way.
That’s always one of the tricks these companies pull. They take some communally-owned thing that used to have a clear purpose and start using it for their different for-profit use.
Take sidewalks. They’re surprisingly expensive to build, but they’re built from community tax money so that people walking don’t have to walk on the road. Now Uber is using them as a place where they can drive their robots. Are they paying anything? I assume not. Sidewalks have also become a favourite parking spot for rental scooters. Do the scooter companies pay for that? Of course not. Even when they’re parked well they reduce the space available for walking, and when they’re parked badly they can force pedestrians out into the street.
Ugh the rental scooters. Thankfully I’ve seen this dying down. A more common sight in my city now is parking spaces getting turned into bike rental stations. I’m all for that.
The scooters are so much better though? Just park near where you need to go, not where the bike station is. Just take photos of the poorly parked ones and whoever last parked it gets a fine.
Yeah the scooters are great, it’s the lack of enforcement for proper parking that sucks.
Like they make you take a picture to prove you parked it properly. One time I screwed up and took a picture of only my feet. Nothing happened.
Except you jjust know they are taking audio and visual, and scanning wifi and phone and other freqencies and sending it all back to base, that’s the problem.
Throw them all into the river! Why rent everything we used to own anyway?
Even if I had my own, I wouldn’t carry it across country for a visit of a few days, but I did rent in such a case more than once.
It’s really more about unenforced safety rules, people sometimes drive like crazy and they always do that on the scooters they own, because rental have a speed limit
Rental makes sense for this because not everyone wants to take a scooter back home and charge it
Not the way it’s being done it doesn’t make sense. A locally owned place that had rules against spying on everyone, and sweeping electronics, yes. A silicon valley operation whose purpose is as much collecting data as it is rental fees, is not.
Better only for the person who drops it right where they arrives at their destination. That is almost never also a sensible place for these things to be. What if everyone just got out do their car the second they were in front of the building they want to go to? That would be so much “better” for them!
That is kind of how taxis work though
Yeah, it sucks when I get out of a taxi and the driver just gets out and leaves their car there.
I don’t need to repeat dark onions response but did you even think for a moment before commenting?
I found myself wondering about this. If you stand blocking the entrance to a building, and won’t move when the police tell you to, I guess I can see them turning that into a disorderly conduct charge. Of course we are solely debating whether blocking a robot is a crime, but their rationale iin court is probably going to be more based around obstructing a place of public accommodation or something like that.
They should’ve given her a warning, the police. To go right to arrest, is a favour that waymo called in to the local policians, probably followed by others donating some cash.
It really is like that, even with prosecuting attorneys that drop charges against the rich, like former manhattan city da with several people, including Weinstein was it? 30k or something donation right after he drops charges. There were several incidents, they didn’t even bother to use intermediaries there.
She did have multiple warnings but she stood true to her rights
What a badass.
Who’s the narc who called the cops on her?
Probably the device itself or it’s pilot
They have pilots? Like, I could get paid for driving an FPV RC car all night instead of not getting paid for that like I do now!? I figured they were autonomous.
I imagine they are self driving and someone monitors several remotely. If one appears to be stalled or throwing an error code it likely pops an alert, you select the device view the cameras to see what’s gone wrong and place a suggested input of how to resolve the situation. That’s essentially what they did for their self driving cars when they start out, then eventually the alerts become less and less but someone still exists.
That’s what I had assumed, oh well.
I’m sure they have a whole call center in India or something that gets reports when a vehicle isn’t able to move towards its delivery, so they check the cameras and then call the local cops if someone is in the way.
