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.

(They're homophones, but the one you want is "disperse" (cognate of "sparse"), rather than "disburse" (cognate of "purse")).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disperse#English

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disburse#English

if two humans were engaged in a similar standoff

i would just let them stand there like the idiots they are. (unless that happens in the middle of the road)

That word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means.