A retired professor was handcuffed and arrested last week, for the crime of standing on the sidewalk in front of a delivery robot.
According to local channel 6ABC, 78-year-old Carolyn Marvin was arrested in Philadelphia’s Center City, after planting her feet in the path of an oncoming Avride delivery robot. Marvin, a retired communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told local reporters she was protesting the robots due to the threat they pose to local delivery workers.
“I know they’re taking the jobs of human delivery workers,” Marvin told 6ABC, “and so I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward.”
The “confrontation” — if you can call it that — attracted a small crowd, who watched as police ordered Marvin to move out of the robot’s path. When she refused, citing protected speech, she was arrested and charged with one count of disorderly conduct, which she reportedly plans to dispute in court.
It wasn’t Marvin’s first time passively protesting Philadelphia’s growing fleet of delivery robots, and it probably won’t be her last. Asked by 6ABC whether she plans on continuing her demonstrations, she replied that “I do. Why not?”
“I think it’s my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots,” Marvin continued.
In a separate interview with KYW Newsradio, the retired professor said she was protesting the “ruthless way that rich corporations are casting aside human workers — and here, we’re talking about the humble delivery folks — in order to enrich their bottom lines.”
The incident raises a valid legal question around delivery bots: if the privately-owned devices need unimpeded access to public infrastructure to work, who’s responsible for making sure they have room to roam?
More on robots: Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work
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