Carolyn Marvin, 78, said she is exercising her First Amendment right to protest — and will do it again.

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.”

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    113·
    5 hours ago

    “I know they’re taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward,” Marvin said.

    I mean fuck. Do we want people working as delivery drones? Really? The other post in fuckai about this doesn’t even mention she’s been doing this for month which obscures why she’s been arrested.

    And climate change is real you know? A small robot takes little energy compared to a full sized car.

    Ideally delivery robots should be state owned and accountable to democratic processes. They are a valuable and useful innovation to solve logistic problems. A way to reshape how neighborhoods are build and planned and make them more energy efficient.

    This dogmatic opposition to anything AI is really becoming more and more irrational, less and less grounded in facts and rational arguments. AI needs to be regulated. Like China currently does AI regulations best, but we can’t even imagine things like that any more because people just accept neoliberalism as the new world order and screaming is the only thing left to do apparently instead of demanding regulations or nationalization of certain AI infrastructure. Maybe this is linked to some kind of anti-democracy propaganda campaign. Divide and conquer, and don’t even let talk about regulation enter the public discussion.

      • AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish
        44·
        4 hours ago

        You should dream bigger. We have the technology to not need delivery drivers any more, but you want to keep them? Why? Because you think neoliberal capitalism can’t be replaced with something more just and socialist? That is my charge against this whole critique. Why the fuck do you want people working crappy delivery jobs?

        All of this should be replaced by a national post office type of delivery service.