The city of Philadelphia, which solved engineering when it revealed the world’s largest t-shirt cannon more than a decade ago, seems to collectively believe that technology has gone too far and has banded together to stop it. A 78-year-old woman, whom some would call a hero, stepped in front of a delivery robot that could have been transporting weapons for the robot revolution (but probably just had a sandwich) and refused to let it move forward.
According to Philadelphia affiliate station ABC 13, she was subsequently arrested for her act of bravery/obstruction of commerce.
Per the report, the incident took place last week near Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market. There, a woman saw an Uber-operated delivery robot making its way to a destination and decided to step in front of it, refusing to allow it to move forward like a modern-day Tank Man… if there were basically no stakes.
The situation apparently carried on long enough that other people (narcs) called the police, who responded and commanded the woman to move and let the bot go about its business. When she reportedly refused, police arrested her and charged her with disorderly conduct.
While she got cuffed for her intervention that almost certainly cost that bot a tip because of the late delivery, she told ABC 13 that it’s not the first time she’s blocked a bot’s path. Apparently, she’s made something of a habit of it, and plans to continue to do it despite the arrest.
“I think it’s my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots,” she told the outlet. “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’s not the first Philadelphian to make it clear that the City of Brotherly Love’s affections do not extend to those without flesh and blood. The city is also the place that famously put a stop to the HitchBOT, the hitchhiking “robot” that was attempting to make its way across the country back in 2015.
The robotic social experiment, which had successfully traveled through Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands without incident, could only move forward through the kindness of humans willing to pick up the bot and take it to a new destination. It did not make it out of the Philadelphia city limits, getting vandalized and ultimately beheaded instead of carried forward.
Let this be a lesson to the robots as they plot their takeover: if you start this war on the East Coast, you’re not making it past Philly. They put a crack in the Liberty Bell; what do you think they’re going to do to your metallic head?
