YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Center City Philadelphia

47 points snarky-comments 1 hour ago 40 comments

2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hour ago | parent

Civil disobedience

scun 1 hour ago | parent

"disorderly conduct"

fsckboy 28 minutes ago | parent

the robots are carrying an order, not disorder

anikan_vader 1 hour ago | parent

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…

daeken 1 hour ago | parent

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.)

bentobean 1 hour ago | parent

ACAB?

peab 1 hour ago | parent

"all cops are bad cops" - an idiotic leftist acronym, a remnant from the BLM days

defrost 1 hour ago | parent

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.

margalabargala 1 hour ago | parent

That's not actually what it stands for...

throwitaway222 47 minutes ago | parent

you sure about that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACAB

pests 33 minutes ago | parent

Did you read your link? Literal first 8 words:

> ACAB, an acronym for all cops are bastards

15feetOfclay 1 hour ago | parent

Interestingly, it isn't strictly "leftist". In fact it was used by both racist and anti-racist skinheads.

tintor 1 hour ago | parent

All Cats Are Beautiful

derektank 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

zamalek 53 minutes ago | parent

> But whether they're lawful orders or not is a different matter; strongly suspect that if this went to trial

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.

Aurornis 40 minutes ago | parent

No, it was for this:

> 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 39 minutes ago | parent

there is not traffic on the sidewalk :)

blooalien 31 minutes ago | parent

> there is not traffic on the sidewalk

"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.

smallerize 1 hour ago | parent

I would be surprised if these robots were taking many jobs. Aren't they mostly piloted by people?

wnevets 1 hour ago | parent

> Aren't they mostly piloted by people?

In which country? People normally consider outsourcing to a cheaper country as taking jobs.

majormajor 1 hour ago | parent

Second-hand info, but: I've heard humans only take control when the system flags that they're stuck.

snarky-comments 1 hour ago | parent

Stuck or blocked by some first amendment disorderly protestor type

fsckboy 28 minutes ago | parent

what I have heard is that they also summon the human operator input at all intersections / crosswalks / traffic signals.

tintor 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, by offshore teleop pilots from low wage countries. They are still taking local jobs.

Those kinds of robots should never be allowed on sidewalks.

left-struck 1 hour ago | parent

The police only helped her cause by arresting her I imagine.

jimmaswell 1 hour ago | parent

Her "cause" of making everyone's lives worse by delaying food delivery? Why would I ever support this?

nickthegreek 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

antonvs 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

left-struck 31 minutes ago | parent

Regardless of whether you or I think it’s a worthy cause, I’m just pointing out that the police amplified her voice.

tuveson 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

sublinear 1 hour ago | parent

Is this the new "dog bites man"?

zer00eyz 1 hour ago | parent

Never change Philly... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT

I have to wonder if in the long term this bot is an uber product or a restaurant owned product.

waltbosz 1 hour ago | parent

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

ai-x 55 minutes ago | parent

So, she is protesting against People having their food delivered to them?

antonvs 53 minutes ago | parent

FTA:

> ... she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.

sammy2255 48 minutes ago | parent

What is the charge?

tuveson 31 minutes ago | parent

Obstructing the delivery of A Succulent Chinese Meal

fsckboy 31 minutes ago | parent

>What is the charge?

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 26 minutes ago | parent

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?!

My worry is that the robot is not just de facto but also de jure privileged. This could happen because the protections for the robot stem from the statute recognizing it as a "pedestrian".

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.

So if the robot is a "pedestrian" but does not have "will" or "personhood" then it gets all the protection with none of the obligation.

Personhood is complicated, of course. But I don't think that the courts have contemplated whether these robots have the "will" required for criminal culpability. If not, then these robots are de jure the most privileged people on the sidewalks (if they are people, which I assume they are, by way of their owners' personhood, but I'm actually not sure!).

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.