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No Tips! Robotic Food Delivery In Phoenix
Waymo and Uber Eats are partnering to offer Uber Eats food delivery with autonomous Waymo vehicles.
If you do get an autonomous vehicle, you’ll have to meet it at the curb to pick up your food. To get into the car, you’ll use your smartphone to gain access to the vehicle’s trunk and get your food out of it. Also, in this case, the tip you selected when you made the order won’t get charged.
(Via electrek.)
Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein was, as usual, ahead of the curve when he described delivery robots in his 1962 novel Podkayne of Mars:
Someday, all of this machinery might be underground, as envisioned by Golden Age scientifiction writer Miles J. Breuer in his 1932 story Mechanocracy:
The orders will go through the Uber Eats app the same way any order does, but when your order is confirmed you’ll get a prompt stating “autonomous vehicles may deliver your order.” If you don’t want this, you can opt-out and get a human driver instead (you can also set this as a separate toggle in your drop-off options).
... the time he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks and charge them to my code number without (so far as anyone could ever prove) disturbing the company’s seal on the control box.
They leaped out on the floor. Again there were no people. No bawling speakers. No gongs. Only the open mouths of pneumatic tubes, an endless row of them, each marked with its destination...
(Tube Station from 'Mechanocracy' by Miles J. Breuer)
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