The news that delivery robots have finally driven UK regulators to the brink is, frankly, a delight. These whirring little bins on wheels, emblematic of our age of convenience, have at last provoked a backlash so fierce that the Department for Transport is tearing up the rulebook. MPs speak of 'chaos on pavements', of ‘menaces to the elderly’, of a 'Wild West of automation’.
How wonderfully, gloriously Victorian. We are replaying the Luddite riots, but this time the enemy is not a mechanical loom but a six-wheeled cooler with a Lidl sticker. The great irony is that we built these things to spare ourselves effort, and now we find them blocking our path, literally and metaphorically.
The real scandal is not the robots themselves, but the nature of the society that produced them. We have forgotten what it means to deliver a parcel, to walk to the shops, to carry our own burden. We outsourced our legs to algorithms, and now we are shocked to find the pavement has become a logjam of idle machinery.
The regulators’ panic is a symptom of a deeper cowardice: the refusal to say no to technological 'progress' until it is too late. Will they ban the robots? Not a chance.
More likely they will paint lanes for them, as if segregation solves the problem of a society that has surrendered to convenience. We are not rewriting the code of the road; we are rewriting the code of human dignity. And we are losing.
