Why do people kick Uber Eats robots?
Within the first three weeks of the delivery robots’ arrival in Philly, videos emerged of people sitting on them, graffitiing them and eventually kicking one over.
And it’s not just Philly:
A quick web search produces a long list of examples of people being filmed or filming themselves attacking robots.
Buy why?
In Ouellette’s dissertation, “From Fiction to Friction: Abusing Autonomous Mobile Robots,” she created conditions to try and find out what motivated subjects to kick a robot. The experiments tested whether the aggression was a form of moral violence — where the aggressor sees the victim as deserving the kick, because it’s malfunctioning or in the way — or instrumental violence — where the kick is a means to an end, like a financial reward, in this case $100.
I’ll assume the 150-page dissertation isn’t this reductive, but the possible motivations presented here strike me as rather short-sighted. “Moral violence” can mean a lot of things, and this article glosses over the big-tech trajectory that got us here, with companies like Uber building nine-figure valuations on the back of underpaid labor and then gleefully automating that labor away, not to mention extorting customers with surge pricing, dodging accountability when things go sideways, and many other despicable business practices. And all in service of minimizing our interaction with other humans. Whether or not someone vandalizing an Uber Eats robot or a Waymo is thinking in precisely those terms, I think the pernicious influence these companies have had on our society can provoke a very understandable sense of dread in someone encountering one of their mechanoid foot soldiers in public.