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San Francisco is considering a ban on delivery robots, those cute little boxes on wheels that are being tried out in Washington by Starship Industries and now in San Francisco by Marble. A supervisor used the same words I have used on TreeHugger in Sidewalks are for people. Should we let the robots steal them? April Glaser writes in Recode:
"Our streets and our sidewalks are made for people, not robots," said Supervisor Yee in an interview with Recode. "This is consistent with how we operate in the city, where we don't allow bikes or skateboards on sidewalks."... Yee worries that the robots aren't safe, saying that seniors, people with disabilities and children won't be able move out of the way quickly enough as these machines roll down city sidewalks at walking speed.
Representatives for the robots had no comment.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- on Saturday June 03 2017, @03:25AM (1 child)
and wrapped in the faux political correctness of defending the rights of senior citizens from being terrorized by sidewalk lording 'bots. First, SF is like fucking Logan's Run: hardly anyone here is over 30. Second, the sidewalks are clogged with sidewalk lording homeless/drug addicted/crazies whom the city has failed to do anything about (despite numerous efforts to effectively ban them via "sit lie" etc. legislation). One estimate has it at 5,000 of these androids clogging up our Senior Citizen friendly paved streets with various mounds of trash/shoppiing carts/trash cans/bicycles/baby strollers, themselves sleeping in sleeping bags or in tents, or just panhandling if they are conscious or sober enough to do so.
Meanwhile, hard working robots get banned because of an unproven fear of a Senior getting tripped up and spraining an ankle over R2D2. Does this make sense? If walking around a sprawled half-naked semi-conscious man on the sidewalk doesn't cause Grand Auntie May to get a broken hip, how does some rolling food cart do so?
I hate tech hipsters as much as the next guy/girl/android but this smacks of cyber-racism. I say, robots have rights and deserve equal treatment before the law.
https://newrepublic.com/article/114112/anonymouth-linguistic-tool-might-have-helped-jk-rowling
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 03 2017, @09:13AM
Ok... senior citizen here.
I had enough of being ankle-nipped with strollers at Disneyland I quit going there. The stroller was an ideal "senior citizen goad" for those behind wanting to hurry the line along... they'd shove it into your ankle... "'scuse me", then repeat. I could not retaliate because there was a baby in there.
The only weapon I found that worked was a large coke. Swing it around carelessly. When they ram the stroller into your ankle, drop the soda into the stroller. Oh "scuse me!" and its supposed to be OK.
Well, its a plausible excuse for them to ankle-nip me, so I leave them a nice sticky mess to clean up. Even if it gets on the baby, it won't hurt it... just makes more of a mess for them to have to clean up. If you are really fed up, make sure the soda is the sugary sticky sort.
Buy paying $5 for "stroller protection" is taking it a bit far. Easiest to quit going.
Now, I am going to have to find some way of getting out of the way all the time for squat little trip-hazards coming up from behind?
Geez, more than once I have tripped up over those advertising signs businesses put out on the sidewalk. Especially if they have legs that stretch out below them.
When one gets older, falls can be disaster, as the bones are more brittle.
My grandma got snarled up in one at a supermarket, and she spent TWENTY-FIVE YEARS in the nursing home because of it. Her hip broke clean off, but all of her biological machinery kept going for quite some time. So did the doctor and nursing home bills. Which the grocery store was on the hook for.