San Francisco’s urge to regulate its robots
ANOTHER VIEW:
Californians can count on San Francisco to innovate and exasperate at the same time.
As a recent story in Wired magazine noted, the city of $28 loaves of fresh bread also is both the home of a high-tech company that created a rolling sidewalk robot that delivers restaurant meals to your home or office and an ordinance passed this month by its Board of Supervisors that severely limits the ability of the ‘bots to do so.
Initial skepticism about the little R2-D2s is certainly understandable. Just as when pondering the coming of driver-less cars, all kinds of questions come to mind.
What if their circuitry goes haywire?
With urban sidewalks crowded enough as it is with pedestrians, pets, guitar-playing buskers with their legs spread out, sandwich-board signs, street trees and other hazards, do we really need add AI machines into the mix?
Well, the thing about initial skepticism when it comes to robotics is that there are often logical answers to the human questions.
Of course proud, practiced drivers howled with what-ifs back when driver-less cars were first suggested.
How could a hunk of metal and plastic with an automaton brain rival our motor skills and intuition behind the wheel?
As sensor and camera technology rapidly improves, the answers came quickly, as did realizations of the relative limitations of fleshand-blood drivers.
Robots don’t get drunk. They don’t text while driving.
They don’t get distracted by a toddler in the backseat or a pretty person walking by.
Kept in proper tune, they don’t lose their vision and physical dexterity to with age.
So driver-less cars on the roads are right around the corner. Why not lunch-delivering robots?
Because, says San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee, “you’re inviting potential collisions with people.”
So under the new city law, according to Wired, companies “will have to get permits to run their robots under strict guidelines in particular zones, typically industrial areas with low foot traffic. And even then, they may only do so for research purposes, not making actual deliveries.”
Wheras the states of Idaho and Virginia have recently passed laws specifically enabling robot delivery, with certain safety provisions.
Probably, eventually, San Francisco, simultaneously home to so many tech visionaries and an urge to regulate, will, too.