Philadelphia Police Restore Order After Woman Obstructs Robot's Right to Deliver Burritos
A retired professor was arrested for standing in front of an Uber delivery robot. The robot has declined to press charges, mostly because it cannot talk.
Satire This article is fiction. Any resemblance to sane reality is coincidental.
PHILADELPHIA — Law and order returned to Center City this week after police moved swiftly to protect the most vulnerable member of the city’s workforce: a knee-high plastic box on wheels carrying somebody’s lunch.
The real part first. According to The Verge, Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of its way. PhillyVoice reports that Marvin, a retired University of Pennsylvania professor, had been blocking Uber Eats robots for months before this week’s arrest.
Her reasoning was not complicated. “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,” she told Philadelphia’s ABC station, as quoted by The Verge. Police asked her to move. She refused. Officers placed her in handcuffs. The whole thing was filmed, and the video has since travelled a great deal further than the robot ever will.
A brave machine speaks
The robot, which we are calling Unit 7 because nobody asked its name, was unavailable for comment, owing to having no mouth, no feelings and a strict policy of only communicating through a small blinking light.
“Unit 7 showed tremendous composure,” said an imaginary Uber spokesperson. “Faced with a human obstacle, it did exactly what it was trained to do: stop, wait, and quietly let the food go cold. That is the kind of professionalism you cannot get from people, because people eventually complain.”
Sources who do not exist say the robot later completed its delivery and received a one-star rating, which it accepted without protest, as it accepts everything.
The labour dispute nobody can win
The episode has opened a difficult debate about the city’s newest workers. Supporters of the robots point out that they never call in sick, never ask for a raise and are only rarely kicked into the Schuylkill. Critics point out that this is exactly the problem.
Labour organisers, in our heads, have proposed a compromise in which every delivery robot must be accompanied by a human worker who walks alongside it, carries the food, and lets the robot take the credit. Economists we just made up called this “the most American solution possible.”
What happens next
Uber, in the version of events we invented, is said to be considering a new safety feature that lets its robots detect protesters and politely reroute around them. A beta version reportedly just drives around the block for 40 minutes, which delivery customers say makes it feel exactly like the human service it replaced.
The city, meanwhile, has learned something important about its priorities. Block a road with a car and you get a parking ticket. Block a road with yourself, in front of a robot carrying a burrito, and you get handcuffs and a viral video.
Somewhere in Center City, a lunch order arrived late. Nobody tipped.
This is satire. Unit 7, the Uber spokesperson, the labour organisers, the economists, the one-star rating and the rerouting feature are invented. The arrest, the disorderly conduct charge, the months of protests and Carolyn Marvin’s quote are real and sourced above.