A 78-year-old professor was cited for disorderly conduct after standing in front of an Uber Eats robot
Carolyn Marvin, a retired University of Pennsylvania professor, has made a habit of blocking Philadelphia's Uber Eats delivery robots. Last Wednesday police were called for 'criminal mischief involving a robot'.
She stepped in front of one on Filbert Street just after a flu shot, and refused repeated requests to move and let it finish. Police issued a disorderly conduct notice; Marvin plans to contest it on First Amendment grounds.
HN split between 'sidewalks are for humans' and 'she's protesting the wrong thing'.
The incident on Filbert Street
PhillyVoice reports that at about 1:16 p.m. on the 1200 block of Filbert Street, Marvin, 78, spotted an Uber Eats robot on her way from a flu-shot appointment and stepped in front of it. Police asked her to let the robot finish its delivery; she refused, and officers issued a disorderly conduct violation notice. The robots began operating in Philadelphia in March, and Uber declined to comment. Marvin says her protest targets companies that displace human delivery workers, and that she never blocks the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
"It's a standoff, so why arrest only her?"
"She's literally just standing there. She doesn't move out of her way to let the robot pass, but neither does the robot move to let her pass!" — a commenter arguing the robot should yield
Others tested the logic of the charge: one asked what police would do if the same collision happened between her and a human friend, with one deemed to be delivering something.
Whose job is it anyway?
"Let's continue this process and protest the use of other automation like commercial dishwashers and street sweeping trucks." — a Google senior staff security engineer working on GenAI security
A more specific rebuttal came from an infosec commenter:
"A delivery robot has much fewer externalities than your typical delivery person." — a commenter in infosec and cryptography
His list: illegal e-bikes, ignored traffic laws, no insurance.
The sympathetic skeptics
Not everyone cheered for the robots. A site-reliability engineer said he is sympathetic to her cause because the current robots are "poorly designed and behaved", while expecting better ones to be inevitable. Another reader suggested a less costly tactic: hand out free flyers and cover the robot's camera pod.
What matters legally is the question the thread kept returning to: whether a delivery robot counts as a pedestrian with a pedestrian's right of way, which is the premise behind a disorderly conduct notice.
Get breakdowns like this every day
The top Hacker News stories, unpacked — by email, Telegram, or RSS.
Linux 7.2 was one of the busiest kernel cycles ever, and LWN is worried who understands the patches
The 7.2 cycle merged 16,418 changesets from a record 2,652 developers, 613 of them first-timers. LLM-assisted patches are a growing share of it.