Pennsylvania's 2020 robot delivery statute was poorly written because it failed to contemplate the meaning and consequence of traffic code when pedestrians are not humans, are not even necessarily people, and have no will.

Consider:

When the police officer gave the human an order to disburse, and the person willfully refused, they then went to jail. Perhaps they are vindicated. Perhaps not. (even if vindicated the process is the punishment.)

However, if a police officer also gives the robot a verbal order to disburse, and the lidar just sits there are spins, who goes to jail? And if willfulness is a component to the crime, and the engineers did not design a system capable of understanding police orders, then did a crime even occur?

In PA statute, "pedestrian" confers mostly protection, not obligation. The corresponding obligations imposed on human pedestrians in PA code are mostly downstream of willfulnes and/or personhood. I.e., you need to be a person or act willfully to be bound by the typical obligations of a pedestrian.

The law worked well to-date because all pedestrians were human persons, so you didn't end up in a weird edge case of having a pedestrian's protections without a human person's obligations. But if the robot gets all the protections but few of the obligations of pedestrianhood, well, that violates my moral intuition.

In the spirit of intellectual curiosity regarding this fascinating legal situation, the next officer facing a similar situation should issue a disbursal order to the robot and the human, and the DA should pursue criminal charges against any party that willfully refuses that order. Which, to be fair, is probably what would happen if two humans were engaged in a similar standoff.

What happens if you place something on the top of one of these things? I'm imagining a second robot that sits atop and sprays silly sting at pedestrians it detects. Or one with an air horn that goes of randomly. or one that attaches to the side at the bottom and uses a series of spray chalk guns to dot matrix messages into the sidewalk. :p

Never change Philly... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT

I have to wonder if in the long term this bot is an uber product or a restaurant owned product.

What is the charge?

I would be surprised if these robots were taking many jobs. Aren't they mostly piloted by people?

So, she is protesting against People having their food delivered to them?

Is this the new "dog bites man"?

Civil disobedience

The police only helped her cause by arresting her I imagine.

Arrested for refusing to yield to a motor vehicle on a public sidewalk? Curious to see if they can find any jury in the land that won’t laugh this one out…

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