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Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

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Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#51

Post by chao- »

schoen wrote: post #24
meowkit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the fatalities for e-bikes vs SUVs in the US per year? Your comment is irrelevant otherwise because last time I checked cars are the real problem, and concerns over e bikes / delivery bots is just another lame extension of “safetyism” and ignorance around public transport failures that just misses the mark. “Riding in traffic” is half the issue here. Like trying to explain water to fish.

I'd like to think I'm about as car-skeptical as your average person with no driver license who just got back from taking three forms of transit home from an all-day recreational road cycling event. But I'm a bit nervous about the speeds of some e-bikes. A friend of mine spent a week in the hospital recently after crashing his new e-bike almost immediately after buying it. One interpretation of his accident is that he…

I'm sorry to hear about your friend, and hope they recover well.

Something I think a lot about when it comes to e-bikes, is the level of protective gear people feel they ought to wear on "a bike". Not all cyclists even wear helmets (obviously bad), but in addition to a helmet, on an e-bike you really ought to be wearing elbow and knee protection, purely because of the speed involved.

However, my sense is that people (a) don't think about that at all because they think of it as just like a bicycle, or (b) don't want travel with all of that extra gear. They want to treat an e-bike like a bicycle, when it is something much more.

I say all of this as a cyclist (non-e-bike) and rollerblader. On my bicycle I will just wear a helmet, but because of the particulars of rollerblading, I always wear elbow-pads and knee-pads. Differing circumstances require different adaptations.

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#53

Post by SwellJoe »

Markoff wrote: post #40

If they didn't use sidewalks, bike paths, pedestrian crossing or roads obstructing mostly pedestrians I think I wouldn't have problem with them, butt that's not the case so I dislike them very much, though I like the use of technology. But overall they support unhealthy lifestyle, they deliver food (at least here in Europe they seem to be used only for food) only over short distance where client could easily and fast…

Counterpoint (though I agree there is often a problem with them sharing often already insufficient pedestrian infrastructure): Many people can't walk to pick up their food.

Pervasive delivery service is a huge quality of life improvement for a variety of disabled folks and folks who are homebound for whatever reason.

And, the alternative to these robots is exactly this:

"We have already problems with stupid drivers parking their cars or even driving their cars on sidewalk"

The alternative is not, actually, that everyone will walk to go pick up their food. It's either a gig worker, almost certainly in a car, probably a gas-driven car, or a little electric robot. It's usually a choice between more cars on the road or more robots on the sidewalk. I used to get deliveries by bike, sometimes, and that's also cool, but pretty rare outside of particularly dense cities.

I don't actually have any objection to their use being limited/regulated in some areas if they're disruptive for pedestrians. But, consider what they replace, and whether they're worse or better. (You may come down on the side of "worse", and I won't argue with you. In some places, they probably are.)

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#54

Post by deaux »

dylan604 wrote: post #29
jszymborski wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's very rational to hate them for taking up public infrastructure for pedestrians, which already is often neglected in NA cities. Our cities already deemphasize people being out and about in public spaces, so car-centric, and this is an entirely intolerable insult to injury. They further alienate folks from jobs in their community, they exacerbate the already artificial friction of just walking to a restaur…

> so car-centric Isn't this a solution to that though as the delivery would otherwise be made by a human in a car. I don't have these robots in my area, but I do have the Walmart delivery drones. Those are interesting to watch. A neighbor recently had a delivery by two drones where one approached within seconds of the first recovering the cradle before moving into the same spot. To the point that I was left wondering…

> Isn't this a solution to that though as the delivery would otherwise be made by a human in a car.

No, it does the direct opposite. It makes it worse for humans to walk. It actually makes it better for non-delivery humans to take a car, because there's less delivery drivers on the road.

Improving car-centrism would be the exact opposite. It would improve the human walking experience and degrade the human driving experience.

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#55

Post by Marsymars »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #41
seemaze wrote: post #33

I stumbled on the most hilarious cross-walk encounter between one of the these delivery bots and a Waymo in downtown phoenix.. it seems that neither was programmed (probably rightfully so) to take the initiative in the situation, so what ensued was a painfully drawn out exchange of agentic deference.

Interestingly, the solution to this problem in humans is that all humans have different individual aggressiveness levels. That works pretty well, but I would guess it won't be one of the first things that robot fleet operators try.

Makes me think of https://www.thecut.com/2015/01/manslamming-manspreading-micr...

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#56

Post by Marsymars »

XorNot wrote: post #36
nixpulvis wrote: post #34

I hate them, but not for perhaps the normal reason. I also hate the way delivery has progressed. Delivery used to be relegated to a few types of food which were designed better for it. Remember when your pizza came hot in an insulated pizza sleeve, not dropped at your entrance cold and sad? We're making it more and more normal to completely avoid interacting with each other and having service be something we cherish,…

I don't know what harm you are imagining happens here. Because the actual environmental harm of normal customer pick up is pretty large - its very inefficient to have hundreds of people converge on one location, rather then a single person or (robot) deliver many orders to the same hundreds of people.

> Because the actual environmental harm of normal customer pick up is pretty large - its very inefficient to have hundreds of people converge on one location, rather then a single person or (robot) deliver many orders to the same hundreds of people.

A few months ago, this was the reasoning that tipped me into looking into grocery delivery options.

Unfortunately, I'm not really interested in services using instacart/doordash/etc., but they've been driving the in-house delivery services out of the market. Of the ~5 grocery services here, 2 were always instacart/doordash, the formerly 2 best options abandoned their in-house services within the past year, and the remaining option is expensive enough that I'm not really motivated away from just driving over to the closest store myself. (The store with delivery is notably further away.)

I guess maybe that's just the cost of delivery outside of the gig model, and the dis-efficiencies of everyone driving to the store are externalized away...

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#57

Post by vrganj »

kurtis_reed wrote: post #43
siliconc0w wrote: post #38

I don't get how it's okay to commercialize public side walks. Can I just put a vending machine on wheels, park it in front of people's homes, and raise a 100M to replace convenience stores?

Guess what, human couriers use the sidewalk

Human couriers also walk on the sidewalk.

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#58

Post by jochem9 »

XorNot wrote: post #36
nixpulvis wrote: post #34

I hate them, but not for perhaps the normal reason. I also hate the way delivery has progressed. Delivery used to be relegated to a few types of food which were designed better for it. Remember when your pizza came hot in an insulated pizza sleeve, not dropped at your entrance cold and sad? We're making it more and more normal to completely avoid interacting with each other and having service be something we cherish,…

I don't know what harm you are imagining happens here. Because the actual environmental harm of normal customer pick up is pretty large - its very inefficient to have hundreds of people converge on one location, rather then a single person or (robot) deliver many orders to the same hundreds of people.

Not the original commenter, but I share the same sentiment.

The harm done is that there is less human interaction outside one's bubble. Before deliver-anything-at-home you were forced to be in environments where you'd interact with people you'd normally not see.

At some level you're also building a connection if you're interacting with the same service employee or bump into a neighbor.

Strong communities is a massive boost to public health. It reduces loneliness and prevents all kinds of deceases (heart stuff, dementia, etc). It also builds a safety net so people don't have to rely so much on official healthcare.

Now obviously just some food delivery is not destroying community by itself. There's probably worse offenders out there. However, society becomes more and more parallel and robots do contribute to it. Unfortunately it's not something that's discussed a lot.

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#59

Post by globular-toast »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #41
seemaze wrote: post #33

I stumbled on the most hilarious cross-walk encounter between one of the these delivery bots and a Waymo in downtown phoenix.. it seems that neither was programmed (probably rightfully so) to take the initiative in the situation, so what ensued was a painfully drawn out exchange of agentic deference.

Interestingly, the solution to this problem in humans is that all humans have different individual aggressiveness levels. That works pretty well, but I would guess it won't be one of the first things that robot fleet operators try.

The standard way to do it with machines is to use a bit of randomisation along with exponential backoff. It's been used for collision avoidance in network protocols for a long time.

Re: Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

#60

Post by globular-toast »

Who would ever have thought filling up the few places you have to walk with more cars was a bad idea?

This isn't a problem with "robots", it's the problem with cars. People like to drive their own cars, but everyone hates other people's cars. It's universal. It just takes different things to cause people to see the problem. For me it was walking and cycling to get around, for the author is delivery robots.

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