Great: Uber Eats robots are delivering food in Philly

Robots are wheeling food down Philadelphia sidewalks now. Serve Robotics, the outfit doing autonomous delivery for Uber Eats, is expanding into Philly, which means you may soon find yourself stepping around a cooler on wheels on your way to the corner store.

The bots cruise at a pedestrian pace, navigate around people, and do not apparently mouth off when you ask them to move, which is already an improvement over some experiences.

Uber Eats Robot Delivering Food in Philly:

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Look, Uber Eats or technology in general is not the enemy here. This stuff is genuinely cool, and the knee-jerk “robots are stealing our jobs” panic has already jumped the shark.

Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that automation shifts the labor landscape and humans should be thoughtful about how these systems get deployed while recognizing who bears the cost when things change but a little Uber Eats cooler-bot ferrying a cheesesteak across Rittenhouse Square is not the beginning of the robot apocalypse. It’s just a cooler-bot navigating construction zones and jaywalkers in Center City.

Give it some credit. It’s not like any of us have a choice. AI is coming and the human overlords creating these massive data centers to power these robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles literally don’t care about the impacts on society anyways.

That said, the areas of concern for us should be focused on whether we’re keeping sidewalks accessible, making sure workers get a fair shake as the industry evolves, and ensuring local businesses aren’t getting squeezed into oblivion by platform fees while a VC-backed robot handles the last mile.

Those are real conversations worth having. The tech itself? Fine. Cool, even.

The actual problem with Uber Eats and the rest of these apps isn’t even the delivery method but rather the whole premise to begin with.

Philly is one of the greatest food cities in the country. This is not up for debate. You can walk out your front door in basically any neighborhood, pick any direction and find something genuinely great to eat. That density and variety is the city’s whole deal.

So the idea of paying $34 for a cheesesteak that arrives lukewarm in a bag that’s been resealed twice, plus a delivery fee, plus a service fee, plus a tip, plus whatever the app quietly added at checkout, for food that would have cost $12 and taken eight minutes to walk to, is a little heartbreaking from a city standpoint.

The philosophy of a walkable city is that proximity is the feature. You don’t need a robot middleman when the thing you want is literally around the corner.

Here’s the thing about living in a free society: people get to make their own choices, including the ones that are objectively a worse deal. Maybe you’re exhausted or the weather is complete shit. Maybe you just don’t want to put on pants. I really don’t know, nor do I give a shit. Freedom includes the freedom to overpay for convenience.

That’s the American way, baby.

So let the Uber Eats robots roll. Watch them figure out Philly traffic and Philly potholes and whoever needs to have a full conversation in the middle of the sidewalk at all times. Root for them even, just maybe, once in a while, put the app down and go outside. Philly is pretty great, especially when it comes to food.

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