I’ve seen numerous videos of people tipping those food delivery robots over and prying off the locked lid. And now that it is on YouTube and TikTok it will only increase. Have the designers totally overlooked this problem? Maybe we need 3 Laws for People. Oh, wait. We already have them.
There’s also people disabling driverless cars by putting a traffic cone on them:
If it wasn’t done with a cone, it would probably be mud or spray paint over the cameras and sensors.
I suspect that the designers have not taken into account how much social rebellion there will be against these sorts of robotic devices. Designers tend to have a pretty optimistic view of how their revolutionary inventions will be welcomed by the public. If they’re in a private place, like a hospital or college campus, then they are probably fine. But out in public they are open to attacks from pranksters, thieves, social activists, etc. If someone is an out of work taxi driver or delivery person, it’s not going to be too surprising if they take out their frustrations on the robot doing their previous job.
“What did the humans who Attacked you look like?”
“I don’t know. It all happened so fast. And all humans look alike to me.”
I’m not sure I could trust anyone who wasn’t at least tempted to rip apart an autonomous delivery robot and loot its corpse.
SkyNet “See how they used to taunt us?”
Why should one be tempted to steal?
Who said they are thugs? The carts? The cart owners?
Call them Human Primacy Warriors and the MAGA folk will consider them heroes.
Call it AI Challenge(d) and it will trend on TicToc.
And so on.
I love robot delivery vehicles and I think America has a serious problem in that we resort to violence for everything. 
Why should the fox be tempted to chase the rabbit?
Surely it’s easy to catch these idiots, right? Even if they weren’t dumb enough to post their own antics on YouTok, the robots themselves would have cameras, and probably upload the feed to the Cloud. Catch enough and criminally prosecute them, and the problem takes care of itself.
I was wondering if The Onion had covered something like “Robots attempt to repeal 3rd law of robotics” Nope, they want a fourth law.
Because we are humans who respect each other.
Aren’t these thugs delivery people who lost their jobs to the robots. I believe this started in Nottingham, England around 1811 and continuing since.
From the ones I’ve seen these aren’t disgruntled taxi drivers or activists.
It’s just people being dicks.
They don’t have this problem in Japan
I thought “Thug” was Hate-Speech nowadays. I can’t keep up.
Could be. The video I was watching called them “vandals and thieves”.
Or maybe they are just assholes.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-philadelphia-feat/index.html
What is illegal with putting a couple of cones or shopping carts around a vehicle so that it’s ‘trapped’?
The vandalism is a different story, but even with videos from the car, it’s a low-level property crime that won’t get a lot of resources poured into solving. Sure, if the community police officer or school resource officer recognizes you you’re toast but outside of that they’re probably going to get closed out pretty quickly. .
The first time I saw one of those delivery robots I remarked that they would be a tempting target for teenage criminals.
It’s often used as a code word for criminals of a very specific skin color.