Sharing the sidewalk with Uber Eats robots in Philly is a whole new level of dystopia

One of my close high school friends from central Pennsylvania came to visit me last weekend with her daughter to celebrate the girl’s 12th birthday in Philly. Admittedly, I was a little nervous. I don’t have children, I don’t know what 12-year-olds like, and I don’t want to screw up anyone’s birthday, especially a kid’s.

Luckily, her mom provided advanced intel that this preteen is currently into K-pop and hopes to study abroad in South Korea someday. So after stopping by Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens on Saturday morning (where I take all first-time Philly visitors), we decided to surprise her by going to Chinatown that afternoon.

It was my friend’s daughter’s first trip to any Chinatown anywhere, and when she began to see the signs and people and asked where we were going, she let out the kind of joyful shriek preteen girls typically reserve for boy bands. I smiled at her joy and at my pride that I hadn’t messed this up — yet.

I told the girl in advance that she’d see some things on the streets of Philly she doesn’t see at home and that would be hard to see: people experiencing homelessness, people who are in addiction, and people who are suffering from mental illness. Part of living in a city, I told her, is to constantly be reminded of the struggles of others. Hopefully that makes you more compassionate toward all people and grateful for what you do have, but at the very least, it forces you to face the reality of our society and how difficult life is for some people.

What I didn’t warn her about were the robots.

We encountered our first Uber Eats delivery robot made by Avride while walking from the Fashion District parking garage to the Chinatown Friendship Gate. Thankfully, I knew what it was because of my colleague Michael Klein’s story on them last week, and because of a post about them on the Philly subreddit that garnered very Philly responses like: “Bodies in the Delaware. Heads in the Schuylkill.”

Even though I knew what the robot was, it was still really weird to see this boxy thing on wheels navigating independently around people on the sidewalk and across city streets. My guests agreed and it seemed many people around us did too, because they were pointing and laughing at it as it passed.

These robots were breaking folks out of their everyday and pausing people in mid-conversation, and not in a good Philly way, like the unexpected art that adds whimsy and beauty to our city, but in a dystopian way. I found myself creeped out by the robots and what their presence here might portend.

Sure, I’ve seen Marty the robot at Giant supermarkets and I’ve written about the robot cat servers in a few area restaurants, but those are in private businesses. These delivery bots are out in public and unavoidable. It feels very different, like Philadelphia’s murder of HitchBot didn’t prevent a robotic uprising, as we’d all hoped, it only delayed it for a while.

In the nine hours we walked around Chinatown and Center City, we saw three Uber Eats delivery robots. On Filbert Street near the courthouse, one was rolling along ahead of us and a woman in a red shower cap who was parked across the street in an SUV yelled out of her window that they were not delivery robots, but rather police surveillance bots keeping watch on us (while nothing seems impossible today, there is no proof of that).

Philly photographer HughE Dillon even captured video of a delivery bot out on the streets of Philly Saturday night while St. Patrick’s Day revelers were bar hopping with the Erin Express. One person sat on one of the robots, someone else wrote “DESTROY ME PLZ” on it.

Here’s where it gets even weirder for me, because these robots are anthropomorphized with digital eyes that blink and wink and turn into hearts, I began to feel sorry for them. Maybe these robots don’t want to be here either, I thought, maybe they didn’t even want to be invented, but now they’re stuck with us without a choice, just like we’re stuck with them. Of course I know this is all highly illogical, that these are just machines, but emotions aren’t always logical. That’s what makes us human.

When I took my friend’s daughter into You & Me, the Asian toy store with the secret basement-level grocery store, she announced that she had died and gone to heaven and I took great pride in knowing that I’d impressed a 12-year-old.

But what I was even more proud of was that Philly did it’s Philly thing, as I’d hoped. Strangers continually engaged with us, whether it was another customer at a store who saw my friend’s fair skin and, unsolicited, recommended the best sunscreen she’s ever used, or the server at Nine Ting who saw us struggling with the grill and helped us navigate our first Korean barbecue experience. Three different people complimented my friend’s daughter’s outfit — a cute skirt, leg warmers, and Mary Jane combo she’d obviously put a lot of thought into — and it absolutely made her day.

While we encountered robots, our best interactions were with humans.

I hope those robots are the last thing my friend’s kid remembers about her trip to Philly and I hope I don’t look back on that lovely day as a turning point in some larger evolutionary story about humanity and robots.

(I can hear myself now at 85, telling children in the future: “That was the first time I saw robots and humans interacting independently of one another, but it would not be the last!”)

We came home Saturday night to a homemade chocolate birthday cake with vanilla buttercream frosting my husband made. Our bellies already full, our sugar intake already high, we ate it with delight as we recounted the day. The cake dripped with what my husband says is the most important ingredient of any dish — the TLC.

A robot could never.

As I was cleaning Sunday, I found a note my friend’s daughter left in our guest room on a page she’d torn from one of my reporter’s notebooks. In the note, she talked about how thankful she was for the great cake, gifts, and wonderful day.

“Coming back next year!” she wrote.

There was no mention of the robots.