Need Groceries? Shunning Humans? Robots to the Rescue!
Woohoo dear readers, you made it to another Friday.
Yes, it’s Friday. Just check your calendar it really is Friday.
You know, as an Officer of the Court, you can just take my word on this one.
Well anywho, enough doom and gloom. I have some cheerful news for a change.
While the debate continues about whether grocery workers should have a presumption of industrially caused COVID19 infection, your tech-loving humble blogger stumbled upon this article about a lovely town called Milton Keynes.
Neither hunger nor thirst respect shelter-in-place obligations, and everyone still has to eat. But little delivery droids from a company called Starship are making grocery deliveries instead. After logging over 100,000 successful deliveries in the last two years, the robots are serving to minimize the person-to-person interactions your humble blogger loves so much in every trip to the grocery store.
So is this a solution? As I love to quote from HBO’s show The Wire character, Frank Sobotka, “you can’t get hurt if you’re not working.” If such machines could be deployed to make deliveries and thereby reduce the volume of people in-store, is there still a need for a presumption? If grocery store employees no longer interact with the general public but simply pack the robots and send them on their way, where is the injury?
Right now, your humble blogger sees Instacart employees performing this same task. But, employees get injured and file claims – robots do not as they are not human. Apologies to Lt. Commander Data, of course.
Fortunately, for the time being at least, we’re still in a somewhat free market. In such markets, people and companies vote with their feet. Perhaps grocery store employees (or rather the Unions and applicant attorneys trumpeting in their names) win the battle and secure a COVID19 presumption. If the cost of labor only goes up, what alternative is left to automation?
To do some basic field research, I asked one group of applicant attorneys to react to such a robot and captured the following footage:
Have a good weekend, dear readers!