UCLA environmental law professor Sean Hecht was walking across the campus one recent night when he photographed a uniquely modern urban transport scene: a snarl of food delivery robots that couldn’t figure out a way around a pile of discarded electric scooters.
Bystanders tried to help by moving the scooters but became irritated at the lack of response, probably not realizing that the Starship Technologies bots — deferential to their AMD Ryzen cores — weren’t going to budge until the humans stopped crossing back and forth in front of them.
“One student said, ‘We’re trying to help you here,’ which I thought was amazing,” Hecht said. But also, “people were asking why they didn’t just break the robots and steal the food.”
