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Lindsay Ouellette was pretty used to seeing food delivery robots before they arrived in Philly, having used them in experiments for her doctoral dissertation at Temple University.
That said, she was still stunned to encounter her first Uber Eats delivery robot in the wild last month, rolling in front of her near the corner of 18th and Chestnut Streets.
“I was actually taken by how surprised and a little taken off guard I was,” she recalled. “And I’m not trying to harm them by any means, but I was just like, ‘Whoa!’”
An Uber Eats delivery robot navigates through pedestrians across Market Street. (Nick Kariuki/Billy Penn)
She then remembered researching all the stories and videos of people who did try to harm the delivery robots.
“In my mind, I was just wondering, is it only going to be a matter of time before people start acting a certain way towards them and abusing them,” she said.
It didn’t take long at all. Within the first three weeks of the delivery robots’ arrival in Philly, videos emerged of people sitting on them, graffitiing them and eventually kicking one over.
Each incident drew a comparison to hitchBOT, the Canadian hitchhiking robot that had its journey across the U.S. prematurely cut short, along its head, near Old City’s Elfreth’s Alley in 2015 — an event remembered 10 years later in the alley last October.
HitchBOT gets lumped into an infamous list of Philadelphians destroying nice things, including the Portal’s brief stint in LOVE Park, the street poles of Broad Street after an Eagles Super Bowl win. The list goes back as far as the first hot air balloon successfully flown in America in 1793, which was later vandalized while in being stored Philly. It also serves as a warning for future innovations like the Waymo self-driving taxis currently being tested in the city.
But is it fair to stereotype it as a “Philly thing?” Ouellette and other researchers on robot abuse say no.
“I think the perverse pride is a Philly thing. We see places outside of Philadelphia where technologies are vandalized like crazy.” said Donald Hantula, a faculty member in psychology and neuroscience at Temple who was Ouellette’s academic advisor with Temple’s Robot Social Navigation Amongst Pedestrians (roboSNAP) research team.
Lindsay Ouellette now teaches statistics at Temple, seen here with Donald Hantula, a faculty member in psychology and neuroscience at Temple. (Courtesy of Ouellette)
‘The new cool thing on the block’
Both Ouellette, who is now teaching statistics at Temple, and Hantula pointed out that people attacking autonomous mobile robots has been happening all over the country, long before the Uber Eats delivery robots, powered by Massachusetts-based autonomous vehicle company Avride, came to Philly.
A quick web search produces a long list of examples of people being filmed or filming themselves attacking robots. The term “clanker” from the “Star Wars” franchise has become a slur for AI technology.
An Uber Eats delivery robot crosses a street in Center City. (Nick Kariuki/Billy Penn)
Seeking attention and likes on social media is a big motivator, as it has become for many behaviors. Late last year notably, Austin-based company Social Robotics sued content creator IShowspeed for damaging its “Rizzbot” during a livestream.
In some cases, the robots have started hitting back — though unintentionally, we hope. Multiple delivery robots in Chicago have crashed through the glass walls of bus stops and a dancing robot in a hotpot restaurant in California had to be restrained after its moves got too wild.
Ouellette and Hantula also pointed out that the frustration and aggression aren’t new — it’s just been transferred from the things that evoked the same feelings.
Ouellette said that slow-walkers or people looking at their phones while walking had previously evoked similar frustrations to what people now feel about autonomous mobile robots.
Hantula likened the delivery robots to “Marty,” the cleanup robot that has been getting in the way of shoppers in Giant grocery store aisles for years.
If the robots weren’t roaming our streets, the vandals and graffiti sprayers would have likely carried out their activities on bus stops and street signs. The only difference now is that there’s a novel canvas that’s popular on social media.
“There’s a baseline amount of that that goes on no matter what the target is,” Hantula said. “And it’s just that the Uber Eats delivery robots, they’re the new cool thing on the block.”
But why would we want to attack robots?
In Ouellette’s dissertation, “From Fiction to Friction: Abusing Autonomous Mobile Robots,” she created conditions to try and find out what motivated subjects to kick a robot. The experiments tested whether the aggression was a form of moral violence — where the aggressor sees the victim as deserving the kick, because it’s malfunctioning or in the way — or instrumental violence — where the kick is a means to an end, like a financial reward, in this case $100.
The results surprised her.
“Instrumental violence reigns supreme, which was actually the opposite of what I thought,” she said. “I thought that maybe the robot malfunctioning would cause people to want to abuse it more, but it was actually the opposite — showing that these instrumental motives actually have a lot more power than a robot malfunctioning or these moral motives.”
Another surprising finding from the studies was that efforts to make the robots appear more humanlike — like how Avride gave the Uber Eats delivery robot has eyes and expressions — alone did not make people less aggressive towards them. In other words, the robotics and AI industries’ seemingly intuitive attempts to make their technology feel more human or anthropomorphized, to help people feel more at ease around them, may be in vain.
As a Temple PhD student, Lindsay Ouellette checked out the “Remembering hitchBOT” event at the Elfreth’s Alley Museum with Will Ellerbe. Ouellette defended her dissertation on robot abuse a few weeks later. (Nick Kariuki/Billy Penn)
“One of the things that I found is that actually humanizing these robots doesn’t actually act as a protective factor,” Ouellette said “People were willing to harm the robot [with human design features] about the same as one without human design features.”
Additionally, when talking with subjects who kicked the robots, dehumanization “consistently emerged as a mechanism normalizing harm.” So efforts to imbue the robots with humanness created the conditions to dehumanize them, which is troubling.
“One of the most profound drivers of aggression, cruelty, everything, is the idea of dehumanization, where we take people and we create ways to see them as not human, as less than human,” Hantula said.
From her findings, Ouellette suggests that, while fine-tuning the robots and technologies so that they get in our way less, further research and focus needs to go into how humans respond to robots on a “broader situational, cultural and cognitive” level.
“With the Uber Eats robots, let them be rectangles on wheels. Don’t try to turn them all into something like a C-3PO from Star Wars,” Hantula said. “But let them be robots and let us be humans.”
An Uber Eats delivery robot stops for a curious child.(Nick Kariuki/Billy Penn)
