So it has finally happened. The great British public, armed with nothing but righteous indignation and a misplaced sense of nostalgia, has declared war on the delivery robot. Yes, the humble six-wheeled contraption that trundles your takeaway from the local curry house has become the new symbol of everything wrong with modern life.
Councils across the land are now demanding regulation, as if the solution to technological disruption is to smother it in red tape before it can even learn to cross the road properly. One cannot help but draw comparisons to the Luddites of the early 19th century, who smashed textile machinery in a frenzy of misplaced fury. But whereas the Luddites at least had the excuse of economic desperation, today’s critics are merely expressing a vague, inarticulate anxiety about the future.
And that, my friends, is the true crisis: not the robots themselves, but our collective inability to grapple with the implications of technological progress. We have become a nation of intellectual cowards, more comfortable with the comfort of Victorian-era certainties than with the messy realities of a world in flux. The robots are not the problem.
The problem is that we have forgotten how to think. When a delivery robot becomes a cause célèbre, you know the empire is in terminal decline.
