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A retired Penn professor has been blocking Uber Eats robots for months. This week, she got arrested for it (www.phillyvoice.com)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53250107

Police confirmed they had responded to a report of "criminal mischief involving a robot" on the 1200 block of Filbert Street around 1:16 p.m. on Wednesday. A woman on the scene ignored "multiple commands" to move, they said, resulting in a criminal violation notice for disorderly conduct.

Uber declined to comment.

Marvin, who plans to contest the charge on the grounds of her First Amendment right to protest, has been undeterred by the arrest. She plans to continue blocking Uber Eats robots and chatting with curious passersby who ask what she's doing.

"It allows me to talk to people about what's going on," she said. "It's always very interesting conversations that we have, and I think it's good to have those kinds of conversations in public space."

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[–] 4 points 3 days ago (1 child)

"regulation bad" appears to be just an american thing. everyone else is doing it... but it takes time and is not necessarily done well.

these extreme voices get more head space online because that's the only thing that can get any meaningful attention nowadays. you won't see the vast majority of people stuck at "well, some of the things it does are kind of impressive but the practical results are not there for us, i'm not sure why and i don't understand the impact and background entirely so i just don't know". you'll only ever hear from people that are either "AI evangelists" and are backed up by a huge amount of marketing money and propped by the algorithm or from the people who sound like they are about to fire bomb a data center.

there are many people who are much more sober about these things. look at this video for an example: https://youtu.be/xwXM2pHj0g4

IMO the real problem is that both regulation and the so called "free market" are susceptible to being taken over by players that just don't play fair. we all know that LLMs and many other tech "improvements" would not be viable if they had to play by the same rules as everyone else (e.g. source training data, resources and energy in a moral way and charge a fair price for the actual measured contribution they provide). but that's kind of their game, right? they find a way to be more efficient... not necessarily by improving a product but sometimes simply by finding a hole in the rules. and then they haul in the money and use it to put out any competition and poke more holes in the rules.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    Afaik self driving delivery robots or robo-taxies is relatively distant from LLMs. Or maybe there will be breakthroughs by merging these two.

    But yeah the amount of labor you can actually save by using LLMs is quite small so far. It'll only get better at that, but maybe there will be a technological wall. But maybe not.

    Most of the harm being done right now comes from the AI bubble and crazy high marketing budget that you have to understand is mostly aimed at businesses, presentations where they dazzle and hypnotize the C-suits with magic beans. So AI psychosis is real on both sides of the spectrum.

    In that sense fuckai can be seen as a useful distraction from actually talking about either useful regulation (because even that is seen as heresy), discussion about dangers (because LLMs aren't really intelligent at all it's heresy too) or capitalism as the root of all evil. And it's useful to further divide and conquer and create new fault lines within the masses that need to be controlled.

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