FRYD

Huh, fair enough. Still, I do delivery work as my day job and I’m not worried about a box on wheels taking my job.

A single company has some robots delivering short distances in three affluent FL cities. Boxes on wheels will work in a tiny fraction of places around the country and the world. The vast majority of the data collected is useless for them. The technology doesn’t exist to do any better either.

Like I said, Coco Robotics the company behind the FL robot deliveries is more likely to be a company hoping to be bought on the promise they can do more in the future than actually expecting to do any more. They’re private, so we don’t even know what their actual economics look like.

You’re not wrong, but my point was the fact that automated deliveries are a far off fantasy. By the time the physical technology exists to do this, the collected data will be irrelevant. Sure it would be better as a communist fantasy, but the reality is this is useless data being sold to companies that want to pretend it’s possible so their stock value goes up.

Is this bad? I mean I guess it has the potential to damage delivery workers, but isn’t working for grubhub or doordash already kind of a scam anyway? That’s before we consider that the likelyhood of any product coming to market that could actually successfully do deliveries. Sounds like a job complicated beyond the capabilities of any robot now or in the near future anyway.

I’m a very anxious person and I kinda liked the Taco Bell AI drive thru thing specifically because it was way less pressure even if it was annoying. There’s plenty of other stuff I simply won’t buy because I don’t want it enough to overcome my anxiety.

If the chatbots are reliable, I’d much prefer them in most shopping scenarios. So this makes sense to me.

USPS is unionized. No cameras, Way less micro-management, and you can pee when you want to.