Company Pulls Delivery Robots From All College Campuses
College campuses across the country will no longer be swarming with tiny rolling robots.
Starship Technologies, a leading delivery bot company, announced earlier this month that it was ending its university operations and redeploying over a thousand of its meal machines. But the news is just starting to sink in, as various partnered universities all issue official communications mourning the program’s end like obituaries for a celebrity’s passing.
The time has come for the takeout drones to hit the big leagues, as the company intends to focus on doing deliveries for grocery chains and restaurants in cities instead. And shut-in, no-tipping undergrads from coast to coast weep.
https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/delivery-robots-leave-collegeOpen linkView original on pawb.social
45 replies
Are you expected to tip the fucking robot?
Yes, but like a cow
I think that's more commonly like a sheep.
Yes.
Once it is tipped on its side, its easier to remove the batteries and motors.
I’d have 100% done this in college.
I think that’s why they will miss this type of delivery, as you do not tip?
No, that's the point
No no, this is a delivery robot.
After you tip it on its back...
That would be the most American thing to do.
No, the article is saying that it is why these robots were popular. Because unlike a human delivery person, there was no tip expected for the robots.
Would be nice if you could tip the actual cook. Like the food preparation chain is visible on the receipt with boxes for sending a small tip. But only after the meal turned out to be amazing.
But overall it's cool that delivery robots will probably mean an end to tipping culture.
As long as it doesn't become expected, but seeing how tips already work, it'll become expected no matter what. I'd probably see reviews complaining about the food tasting like shit but the reviewer leaving the chef "just the standard 20%" and vowing never to eat from there again.
The world really needs transparency like that - tip your cook, tip the farmer that grew the amazing tomatoes, or stiff 'em all but at least know who they really were. Before placing your order, get a readout of where the fish was caught, and when... identify how close the chocolate's cocoa was grown to toxic lead contamination sites - before you take it off the shelf.
Yeah I'd love that, that would be the future.
That would be my future, if you make me king. Since the offers for absolute unflinching loyalty are a bit thin on the ground for the past couple of decades, I'll assume it's probably not the future we're getting.
Right?! That’d be insane to tip it. Like do people tip autonomous vehicles when they use them? I guess if there is really a human operator, like what Waymo did with having human drivers take over from time to time, all while claiming to be autonomous. I guess in that case, tipping might make sense, so long at the tip went to the driver of the vehicle. I don’t know if driver control these small robots ever or not.
I mean waymo never claimed they would not use human operators from time to time, they in fact disclosed that fact. But people skim over things like that and make statements like yours. Just like I'm positive these delivery bots have the same disclosures.
Yeah they literally have people remote in and fix random things because obviously random things can go wrong and still require human intervention.
A company put these on the campus in town, the robotics engineers built a robot to rob the delivery bots.
I figured that a good percentage of the delivery robots would simply "disappear" from the map and be rebirthed as battle bots in some arena with chainsaw accessories.
robots are friends!
Ah yes, the rob bots, who doesn't know them 😜
𝚁𝙾𝙱𝙾𝚃 𝚆𝙰𝚁𝚂
Not sure how they expect to roll these out by the thousands without completely clogging up sidewalks and bike lanes...
Zipline is where it's at...
When will they set up the catapults to fling deliveries like in Death Stranding?
Clearly, the superior
siegedelivery engine is a trebuchet.They won't be in my area. We don't have sidewalks or bike lanes.
burrito bomber ftw https://www.darwinaerospace.com/burritobomber
Maybe then they'll improve bike lanes
These are the kind of things that could run on a lane built over the sidewalk...
Like I can't build drones to steal from them too.
I think they've been running around in Milton Keynes, UK for a few years now.
Based on the thumbnail, I was expecting some kind of vandalism.
I wish… but no just broke college kids trying to eat cheaper
Not the same story, but I followed a related story about another bot crashing a SWAT scene:
WTF
Every time is see one of these fuckers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5o1c1MJb_Oc
https://lemmy.world/post/44133119
Why would anyone oppose these bots?
I had a booth at a craft show on a college campus a few months back. The little bastards kept trying to route through the show and were constantly bumping in to tables. They even knocked over a couple of tables at a few vendor stalls, damaging some of the items.
This sounds like a real application for Doctrow's "Chuffie" from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom... scan the "how's my driving?" QR code on the lid of the bot and downvote... company's bots gets enough downvotes it gets restricted out of the places it's receiving the downvotes from.
With all due respect, that sounds like it should and could have been solved in a way other than banning a popular service.
Sure, but even if it could, they probably shouldn't just keep running in to stuff and routing through areas where there are known collisions. If those are problems they can't seem to solve, then maybe it's a product that shouldn't exist.
Except the tragedy of the commons was a lie made up by Landlords to justify the enclosure of the commons so that people would be forced to work for them under capitalism, and this is the capitalists ruining the commons.
They block sidewalks, they destroy bus stops, they hurt workers