Philadelphia Arrests Woman for Standing in Front of Delivery Robot, Restoring Robot's Right to Not Be Looked At

SOMEWHERE WITH GOOD WI-FI — Let me start with the good news, because there is always good news. Delivery robots are disrupting Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is disrupting them right back. That is what we call a two-sided marketplace.

Here is what happened. A woman in Philadelphia stood in front of an Uber delivery robot and would not move, according to The Verge and Philadelphia’s ABC13. Police arrived and asked her to step aside. She declined. Officers handcuffed her, and she was charged with disorderly conduct. The whole thing was caught on video, which is great for engagement.

She was not confused about what she was doing. She told ABC13 the robots are taking jobs from human delivery workers, and that she has been protesting them by standing in front of them whenever she sees them. This was not her first time. It was, however, her first time getting arrested for it.

I want to be fair to the robot here, because nobody else is. It was simply trying to bring someone a burrito. It is a small cooler on wheels. It cannot climb stairs. It has never asked for anything, except to go around you.

Uber’s robots have become a common sight in downtown Philadelphia, The Verge reported, and they have drawn backlash. Earlier this year, one was kicked over in Center City. I have been kicked over in a meeting, metaphorically, so I know how that feels.

Let me jump on a quick call with my co-founder. He is building a sidewalk-routing layer for exactly this use case. When a robot detects a human in its path, the app suggests the human move. We are calling it Pardon. It is pre-revenue, but the vision is huge.

Okay, I am back. Pardon just closed a $4 million pre-seed round on the strength of this article, which I have not finished writing yet.

The way I see it, this is a game-changing moment for last-mile innovation. The robot did everything right. It stopped. It waited. It did not escalate. It let the police do that. That is what good product design looks like: the hard part happens somewhere outside the app.

And honestly, the robot is going to be fine. It has a backup battery, a remote operator and a lawyer, which is Uber. The courier jobs it replaces had none of those, which, now that I type it out, might have been her whole point.