![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/fdaff3798860cbcdb0fa75a95ca94cbb51-Milton-Keynes-lede.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Ben Quinton\/The New York Times\/Redux\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n On a languid summer afternoon, I drive to Milton Keynes, a midsize city 60 miles northwest of London and a few miles from my home. The plan is to meet my friend Ole, who has been texting me with increasing alarm about the number of robots rolling through the streets there. You should come see them for yourself, he tells me, and so I do.<\/p>\n Ole (a pseudonym) was an early cyberutopian, one of many who embraced the internet as a democratizing technology, overturning old monopolies and power imbalances. Then the internet was taken over by big-tech companies that established new monopolies and new power imbalances. Recently, he has begun to talk a lot about AI-enabled robots. How do humans fit into the plans of tech companies and aligned governments? And how will the widespread use of robots change our daily lives?<\/p>\n At the moment, there is no better place to answer those questions than Milton Keynes, which for the past seven years has been the site of a major robot-human community outreach project. Before driving over, I ask Google about these robots. The AI overview barges in and immediately answers:<\/p>\n Milton Keynes is home to a successful fleet of Starship delivery robots that deliver groceries and food, fostering a largely positive human-robot bond. These cute, little robot characters coexist with humans on the city\u2019s wide footpaths, operating in an \u201cawareness bubble\u201d to signal their presence and offer thanks for assistance.<\/p>\n Cute little robots, offering thanks. That doesn\u2019t sound too bad. Starship Technologies, I learn, was co-founded by Ahti Heinla, an Estonian computer programmer who was formerly the chief technical architect of Skype. In 2013, Heinla led a team of engineers participating in the NASA Sample Return Robot Challenge. Their goal was to create a robot that could collect space stuff: Mars dust, moon rocks. The following year, Heinla and another Skype alumnus, Janus Friis, founded Starship with the idea of repurposing these robots for deliveries. Starship\u2019s current fleet includes 2,700 robots, which have completed more than 9 million deliveries worldwide \u2014 and 915,000 in Milton Keynes. The pub Ole chooses for our meeting has a garden surrounded by banks of feathery trees. There are lots of swallows fluttering from the eaves, soaring across the fields. Ole says the robots are everywhere in Milton Keynes these days. \u201cThey deliver hot food and groceries,\u201d he says. \u201cAt least, that\u2019s what we\u2019re told they\u2019re doing.\u201d The Starship robots are 99 percent autonomous, but if the world gets too complicated, too unpredictable, they connect to a human minder. They were first trialed in places where not too much happens. Low-density places like office parks and planned communities. Milton Keynes, by that measure, was the perfect terrain.<\/p>\n The British government conjured the city out of thin air in 1967, a planned community built on parkland joining several smaller towns. In the 1980s, there was an advertising campaign (\u201cWouldn\u2019t it be nice if all cities were like Milton Keynes?\u201d) that presented the city as the perfect place for a new beginning. Such optimism was widely satirized. In 1985, the Style Council released a song called \u201cCome to Milton Keynes\u201d which describes a superficially idyllic \u201cnice new town\u201d with an undercurrent of \u201cinsanity\u201d and \u201cslaughter.\u201d There\u2019s always something odd about utopias, Ole says. They\u2019re perfect. And real life is never perfect. So they\u2019re always quite unreal.<\/p>\n \u201cNow Milton Keynes has become the site for another experiment,\u201d Ole says. \u201cThis time with robots.\u201d He suggests that the Starship robots were designed to look unthreatening and low tech, even though they were equipped with ultrasonic sensors, radar, and state-of-the-art obstacle detection. Their neural networks identified and labeled objects so the robot could respond accordingly: Tree. Human. Fellow Robot.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t let them cute you out,\u201d Ole says. \u201cThat\u2019s their plan. They lure you in with a plea for help then \u2026 they cute you out. You start speaking to them as if they\u2019re your little robot pal. Be careful.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo: GodstowShoots\n <\/p>\n Shortly after saying good-bye to Ole, I encounter my first robot. I decide to have a quick stroll before heading into the center of the city, so I wander over to Bletchley Park, a mansion in the suburbs of Milton Keynes where Alan Turing and others worked during World War II on proto-computers to decipher German codes. It\u2019s now a museum.<\/p>\n As I walk toward what I think \u2014 erroneously \u2014 is the entrance to Bletchley Park, I meet the robot. It\u2019s both surreal and somehow instantly ordinary. A small robot, out and about in an English town, passing a line of picket fences and neatly tended gardens. Starship has designed what is essentially a box on six wheels, about the size of a medium suitcase. It has headlights where it might have eyes, if it had eyes. Despite all the vanguard tech that Ole told me about, the robot seems to be having trouble. It\u2019s trapped in the gutter, trying to scramble onto the curb. It\u2019s too small, or the curb is too high, or both. At one point, it articulates its wheels \u2014 this looks impressive but doesn\u2019t help. The robot slides off the curb, falls into the gutter again.<\/p>\n Then it says: \u201cCan you please help me back on the sidewalk?\u201d<\/p>\n Around us: silent houses with blank windows. It\u2019s just me and the robot.<\/p>\n \u201cEr, okay,\u201d I say. \u201cI\u2019ll have a go.\u201d<\/p>\n I make a tentative attempt to push the robot back onto the sidewalk. It\u2019s surprisingly heavy. Then I see a woman in a gray coat approaching us \u2014 by \u201cus\u201d I mean \u201cme and the robot.\u201d She pauses only for long enough to jettison a friendly remark: \u201cThose robots have minds of their own!\u201d Then she hurries onward.<\/p>\n \u201cCould you please help me back on the sidewalk?\u201d the robot asks again. It\u2019s undoubtedly just my imagination, but it sounds impatient.<\/p>\n \u201cSorry,\u201d I say to the robot. \u201cI\u2019ll try harder this time.\u201d<\/p>\n It takes several further attempts but eventually I manage to shove the robot back onto the sidewalk. As soon as it has regained its footing (not the right term; it has no feet), it begins to glide away, narrowly avoiding a beer can, almost falling off the curb, rebalancing again. It makes a futuristic high-pitched whining noise, but the main verb that springs to mind, with reference to its movement, is trundling.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you,\u201d says the robot. \u201cHave a nice day!\u201d<\/p>\n I follow the robot for a while, at a polite distance. It\u2019s easy enough to keep up, because the robot spends a lot of time pausing on the edge of one road or another. Perhaps it\u2019s checking the map, or perhaps it\u2019s awaiting instructions from the central robot mind. Perhaps it\u2019s trying not to fall off the curb again. There are kids walking home from school in little sociable groups, kicking balls, laughing. The robot trundles past, but they ignore it.<\/p>\n I ask a couple of them \u2014 What do they think of the robots?<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re funny,\u201d says one kid. \u201cMy dad uses them when he wants food and stuff but can\u2019t be bothered to go to the shop.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey speak like Americans,\u201d says another. \u201cSometimes they\u2019re friendly, sometimes they don\u2019t say much.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad told me one got hit by a train. It blew up everywhere,\u201d says the first kid. \u201cAlso I saw one by the side of the road the other day. It had been hit by a car.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo you see lots of robots around in general?\u201d I ask. \u201cWhether squished, or blown up, or not?\u201d<\/p>\n The second kid shrugs. \u201cDepends,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes you don\u2019t see them for days. Then, sometimes, they\u2019re everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Why are the robots here at all? I know it\u2019s a planned community, but it still seems an odd place to choose as the robot bridgehead on Earth. But as I drive from Bletchley into the city center I think, Well, maybe it\u2019s not so strange after all. Milton Keynes was designed by a team of brilliant young architects (Ole called them hippies) who imagined a town of 250,000 people. The original plan encompassed nearly 22,000 acres of Buckinghamshire farmland, including villages such as Bletchley, Wolverton, and Stony Stratford.<\/p>\n The idea was not to demolish these preexisting places but to draw them into a massive road grid: an idea derived from American urban planning. The town was then structured into a series of \u201cgrid squares.\u201d Some were for residential areas; some for retail or employment parks; some for green spaces, each linked by fast, wide roads. The aim was to ensure \u201ccommunity without propinquity,\u201d a phrase taken from Melvin M. Webber, author of the seminal paper \u201cThe Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm.\u201d (I don\u2019t know what that title means either.) English towns usually emerge slowly over centuries or millennia. Milton Keynes went from idea to reality in a couple of decades with most of the construction finished by the late \u201980s and the town declared complete in 1992.<\/p>\n Despite its origins, Milton Keynes doesn\u2019t feel uniformly modern. It wasn\u2019t built in the middle of the desert; it was built on and around a collection of ancient villages and farms. When the plans for Milton Keynes were approved, a full archaeological investigation was commissioned before any construction work began. Layers of buried history were revealed, often from previously unknown sites: Iron Age settlements, Roman villas, Saxon roundhouses, medieval estates. At the Milton Keynes Museum, in Wolverton, some of these relics are displayed: a Bronze Age ceremonial sword, a Roman mosaic, ancient coins, weights, looms, toys, jewelry, relics of the Bell Beaker people from the Early Bronze Age.<\/p>\n The young architects knew all of this, and they wanted to relate Milton Keynes to the deep history of England. The city\u2019s three main boulevards are named for ancient ruins and mysterious ritual sites. The road I\u2019ve parked on in the city center is Silbury Boulevard, named for a great neolithic mound in Wiltshire. The next road over is Midsummer Boulevard, which aligns with the rising sun on Midsummer Day \u2014 a deliberate echo of another British neolithic site \u2014 Stonehenge. After that: Avebury Boulevard, named for the great stone circle of South West England.<\/p>\n I think about how these ancient energies may have merged with technocratic attempts to build the perfect city. Milton Keynes is very green with beautiful parks and endless trees. Owing to this dense foliage, you rarely see buildings from the road grid, so it feels as if you are driving through a forest, onward, forever. Or as if civilization has already collapsed and nature has reclaimed its territory.<\/p>\n I walk from Silbury over to Midsummer Boulevard, where there is a nearly 50-year-old mall formerly known as the Shopping Building. Inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, it was opened in September 1979 by Margaret Thatcher. I summon a robot to meet me there using the Starship App. Of course, that\u2019s how the robot invasion works: You download an app and order some groceries. You can select a variation of the standard robot from a series of options: a grumpy one, a well-dressed one with a bow tie, a tuneful one that sings \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d I select the tuneful one.<\/p>\n Soon enough, the Starship robot appears, glowing orange in the fiery dusk. It stops outside the Shopping Building, looking small and plaintive beneath the massive mall. The Milton Keynes locals are accustomed to the robots, but the tourists here are not. Someone says, \u201cIs that actually a robot?\u201d I say, \u201cYes, it is.\u201d Another person says \u201cI must call my wife and tell her. Do you mind if I film it?\u201d I say, \u201cNo, go ahead.\u201d Everyone waits as I faff around with my phone. The robot waits in a different way.<\/p>\n I swipe on the app to open the robot and release my groceries. Its interior resembles a cooler with my groceries in ordinary plastic bags. I remove the bags, close the lid. Then the robot sings \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d The noise doesn\u2019t come from its mouth. It has no mouth. The atmosphere of the crowd changes a little. There\u2019s some bemused muttering, then someone speaks to me \u2014 a bearded guy with glasses. \u201cIt\u2019s your birthday?\u201d he asks. \u201cThat is seriously nuts.\u201d I try to explain that it\u2019s not actually my birthday; this is research. The man smiles politely.<\/p>\n The crowd stops filming, disperses. The man on the phone to his wife moves away. \u201cA robot sang \u2018Happy Birthday,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t even anyone\u2019s birthday.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo: Daniel Leal\/AFP via Getty Images\n <\/p>\n Throughout the summer, I return to Milton Keynes. Sometimes I go with Ole. Sometimes I go with other friends. Sometimes I take my kids along. We meet robots, and we meet people and ask them about the robots. A few stories we hear several times, tales from the robo-lore. A robot was once found, \u201cinjured,\u201d by the side of the road. A kind person had carefully placed it on its side in the robo-recovery position. The following day, the robot was gone.<\/p>\n My kids like the robots, think they\u2019re cute, but also worry about them. \u201cAre the robots happy?\u201d they wonder. Is this the wrong question to be asking? They try to instruct and encourage passing robots or robots we\u2019ve summoned. \u201cGo left, no, not there. That\u2019s the curb. Watch out.\u201d The robots submit with (apparent) good humor to this impromptu robot-minding. Just once, a robot asks my daughter, \u201cExcuse me, could you please let me pass?\u201d She steps aside; the robot rolls off. It doesn\u2019t say \u201cthank you.\u201d Perhaps it\u2019s had enough of humans for one day.<\/p>\n At the supermarket, I talk to people as they come and go, holding bags of shopping, urging their kids along, or speaking on their phones. The robots hang around in the car parks, as if awaiting orders from their alien mother ship. Suddenly one of them is activated. A shop assistant puts some bags in its cooler, shuts the lid. The robot spins around and heads off into the grid, along the neolithic boulevards. Through the past, present, into the future. My son takes photographs.<\/p>\n I ask a shop assistant where the robots sleep. \u201cThey don\u2019t stay here overnight,\u201d he says. He\u2019s in his 20s with curly auburn hair. \u201cEach evening they\u2019re picked up by van and taken away. I\u2019m not sure where they go. But when I get into work at 7 a.m., earlier, they\u2019re always here again. Waiting.\u201d<\/p>\n One woman tells me she thinks the robots are \u201ca pain in the arse.\u201d Then she checks herself, glancing surreptitiously at the robots, as if she might have offended them. \u201cNo, no, that\u2019s unfair,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re very popular. People order from them all the time. I just meant that they\u2019re a pain in the arse because they\u2019re so efficient, people don\u2019t come out shopping anymore. A friend of mine, he only lives opposite, he just gets a robot to do everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Other adjectives from other customers include: useful, adorable and \u2026 cute.<\/p>\n A muscular, thickset guy is standing in the car park, eating an ice cream. I ask, \u201cWhat happens if someone tries to smash up the robots? Or tries to steal them?\u201d He looks at me as if I might be planning something.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, they scream their heads off,\u201d he says. \u201cWell, you know, they don\u2019t have heads. Or mouths. But it\u2019s incredibly loud.\u201d<\/p>\n It reminds me somehow of a Harlan Ellison short story from the 1960s, \u201cI Have No Mouth & I Must Scream.\u201d In that story, an omniscient AI has taken over the world. The I of the title is a human who is trapped forever in this hell, commanded by the AI.<\/p>\n Another day, I drive back to Milton Keynes again. The Style Council song runs in my head: \u201cIn our paradise lost we\u2019ll be finding our sanity \/ In this paradise found we\u2019ll be losing our way.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a bright, hazy morning. The summer has been wildly hot. This morning I park next to a step pyramid: a massive metal building in the center of town. People call it the Point, and apparently it was once a cinema, but it looks more like another ritual site. It\u2019s a short walk to Hotel La Tour, a high-rise hotel where I\u2019m meeting Ole. There aren\u2019t many high-rises in the city, and I\u2019ve been using it as an orientation point for weeks, but now Ole has decided that we should ascend to its highest floor and admire the view. Also, their halloumi burgers are delicious.<\/p>\n Ole is right about the view: It\u2019s incredible. On one side there\u2019s an urban panorama of the gridlike city, a place of wide boulevards, concrete, and glass. On the other side there\u2019s a view of the countryside, extending to the misty horizon.<\/p>\n Ole says that there\u2019s an intriguing thing about Starship. One of its investors is Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian like Heinla and also formerly involved with Skype. More recently, Tallinn co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. Tallinn has warned in public about the dangers of unaligned godlike AI \u2014 meaning AI that exceeds human capabilities and doesn\u2019t share our goals. At a speech at the Oxford Union in 2023, Tallinn talked about how large language models such as ChatGPT aren\u2019t really \u201cpretrained\u201d but \u201csummoned\u201d: \u201ca two-page program is soaked in terabytes of data and megawatts of electricity and left like that for months.\u201d Then, attempts are made to \u201ctame the emergent alien mind,\u201d said Tallinn. Ole found these warnings quite striking. Tallinn suggested that this sort of AI required regulation and should perhaps be banned outright, like human cloning was banned. The situation was urgent, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s interesting to me that one of the investors in Starship is warning against an AI apocalypse, which would potentially include an AI-robotics apocalypse,\u201d says Ole. \u201cPerhaps Starship is actually sending their robots to defend us against the emergent alien minds?\u201d<\/p>\n I suggest that it might be quite hard for the robots of Milton Keynes to defend the people of Milton Keynes against godlike unaligned AI. They\u2019ll do their best, no doubt. But, to be honest, the godlike AI would just create towns with lots of steps. Then the battle would be over.<\/p>\n Outside the hotel, I meet a Starship robot trundling along the pavement. I watch it pass, busy with another errand. Then it crashes into a metal bollard with a loud, slapstick clang! It stops, perhaps belatedly trying to recognize this object. A man walks along with a dog \u2014 which barks wildly at the robot, as if to add insult to injury. The man says, \u201cHey, no need for that.\u201d The dog stops barking. The robot reverses and turns, moves away again, this time avoiding the bollard.<\/p>\n \u201cHey, excuse me,\u201d I say to the guy with the dog. \u201cAre you from Milton Keynes? I mean do you live here?\u201d<\/p>\n The man, in his 30s, looks at me a bit suspiciously and says, \u201cI live here, yes. Why?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just trying to find out about the robots, how people feel about them. I live just outside MK, but we don\u2019t have robots in my village. Not yet, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t bother me,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019ve been here for ages. They help people do shopping. For some reason my dog hates them. She thinks they\u2019re coming to get me or something, so she barks to warn them off.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDoes she ever attack them, preemptively?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, never. But she doesn\u2019t trust them. They move quite fast, with purpose. They always have a route, they really go for it. If you get in their way, they dodge around you, carry on. It\u2019s a bit relentless.\u201d<\/p>\n I notice the man is wearing a badge on his lapel, an old punk slogan: \u201cNo Future.\u201d<\/p>\n In mid-August, the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games takes place in China. Humanoid robots from 16 countries compete in events including martial arts, soccer, track, and dance. A Chinese company called Unitree dominates the competition, winning four gold medals in the track events.<\/p>\n I watch the Games from the English Lake District, where I\u2019ve gone on holiday with my family. The clips of the humanoid robots make me think almost fondly of the robo-boxes I saw at Milton Keynes, which periodically relied on assistance from strangers. Starship seems to have a hopeful view of humanity, assuming that we will help the robots and not steal them, or punch them, or generally be unkind to them. It\u2019s a vision of the future that is also quite old-fashioned \u2014 like Milton Keynes.<\/p>\n With this in mind, I speak to Ahti Heinla, the CEO and CTO of Starship. We meet in a cyberroom; Heinla is witty, passionate about his robots. He believes the cultural acceptance of Starship robots is vitally important. Heinla says, \u201cOur earliest question was: What would it take for the robots to be liked?\u201d At first, they wondered if the robots should be humanlike, so they could \u201cblend in the most.\u201d But, he adds, \u201cit is a well-known concept in robotics research that if the robot tries to be too much like a human, then actually people don\u2019t like it. It\u2019s too much, too strange.\u201d After Starship rejected the idea of humanoid robots, the company wondered about making the robots \u201ccool, futuristic, like a spaceship,\u201d according to Heinla. In the end, \u201cwe realized we wanted to create a box, but it had to be a box that is liked.\u201d<\/p>\n When they first came to Milton Keynes seven years ago, the robots could only operate in a place with wide sidewalks and long flat stretches. Now, says Heinla, their robots can operate almost anywhere. Perhaps not in Southern European cities or on Greek islands, places with countless steps. But almost everywhere. \u201cLondon\u2019s Soho on a Friday night?\u201d I ask. \u201cYes,\u201d says Heinla, \u201cthat would be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n I mention that the robots have soft, gentle voices. They\u2019re taciturn, nonconfrontational. \u201cWas that a deliberate decision?\u201d I ask Heinla.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, I think so,\u201d says Heinla. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t want to annoy people. Maybe in the future it becomes a cultural norm that the pavement is full of chatty robots, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the norm right now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow significantly has the software changed since they began development a decade ago? Which developments in AI have been most critical?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFrom the outside our robots have stayed almost exactly the same,\u201d says Heinla. But internally, \u201cthey have changed a lot. There has been a bit of an explosion of different sensors, to enable the robot to understand what\u2019s around the robot. Also machine learning has developed a lot. For example in terms of visual recognition \u2014 is this a person, or is this a car, or a bicycle? Some of the key technologies were in their really early stages ten years ago, compared with where they are now. But also our robots are not built in a way that we put an LLM in the robot and ask whether it should drive left or right \u2014 that\u2019s not how the robot works. It would be hard to make it safe.\u201d<\/p>\n This reminds me of Jaan Tallinn\u2019s speech. Both Tallinn and Heinla grew up in Estonia, under the collapsing utopian fantasies of Soviet Communism. I put this to Heinla \u2014 one of his investors is quite averse to runaway AI. Does this influence his own thinking? Heinla speaks with great warmth about Tallinn.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was my desk mate in high school!\u201d he says. Their shared background seems significant in how they think about the future. \u201cEstonia doesn\u2019t really have the culture of trying to take over the world,\u201d Heinla says. \u201cI think Jaan doesn\u2019t want to take over the world. I don\u2019t want to take over the world. We want to be useful to the world. There\u2019s lots of stuff going on and people are racing to create a future but they don\u2019t quite know what that future will actually do. I think we know exactly what our robots do.\u201d<\/p>\n Ole is in touch: He wants to meet in Milton Keynes again. It\u2019s another beautiful day. The dahlias have come and gone \u2014 earlier than ever. I decide to leave my car in the city center and cycle over to Bletchley Park. It\u2019s a stunning bike ride, along the old Grand Union Canal. Narrow boats moored at intervals, elliptical graffiti on the bridges. At Bletchley, I peer through the iron gates at the buildings where Turing and others worked through the war, using vanguard technology to save countless lives.<\/p>\n Then, I summon a robot. I\u2019m interested to see if it has since learned to \u201cdo\u201d the curb, if new information has been annotated on its maps. The robot comes along soon enough. I open the lid, take my delivery (more groceries), send the robot away. It rolls onto the road and \u2026 gets stuck. Now it articulates its wheels, which still looks impressive but still doesn\u2019t actually help.<\/p>\n It says: \u201cCan you please help me back on the sidewalk?\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s no one else around. Just me and the robot. Again.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you remember me from last time?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n The robot doesn\u2019t reply. Perhaps it\u2019s already identified me. Human. Oh no, that one again. Bollocks. I manage to shove it back onto the sidewalk. After reestablishing its footing (still not the right term), it glides away, avoiding another beer can. This time, it stays well away from the edge of the curb. I wonder if that\u2019s robo-psychogeography or robo-luck.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you,\u201d it says. \u201cHave a nice day.\u201d<\/p>\n I go and have a drink with Ole, in the same pub as before. The swallows are still soaring from the eaves, fluttering across the fields. It\u2019s nearly the end of the summer, the precious final days of August. Soon the swallows will fly south.<\/p>\n Ole asks what I\u2019ve learned from the Milton Keynes experiment. I tell him that the well of the past is very deep \u2014 some might call it bottomless, as Thomas Mann once said. Milton Keynes began as a utopian experiment, yet from the outset the architects understood that their immaculate grid was laid out on ancient land.<\/p>\n Starship is very clever with their robots; they understand that humans aren\u2019t too keen on glittering perfection. It dismays us because it is the opposite of febrile, unknowable, unpredictable life. People like the Starship robots because they need human help. They\u2019re small and modest. They\u2019re not looming over us, or doing backflips, or generally showing off. Instead, they seem to be doing their best, trundling onward. Slightly underrated \u2014 like Milton Keynes.<\/p>\n \u201cThings might get bad for the robots,\u201d Ole says. \u201cif the economy gets any worse. If there\u2019s even more unemployment. If our politicians use robots for the purposes of surveillance and control. Even the friendly robots might find things are pretty rough.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps one day there will be humanoids running along the boulevards of Milton Keynes, scaring us witless as they hand over our groceries. Perhaps there will be frantic quadrupeds, or soaring flocks of drones. Perhaps there will be robot-on-robot apocalypses, one generation of robot wiped out by another. Robots will come for our jobs but then robots then come for those robots\u2019 jobs.<\/p>\n Perhaps we will see lots of unemployed little robots, rolling around Milton Keynes and other places. Or perhaps humans will defend the little robo-boxes, preferring them to creepier alternatives. They\u2019ll smash up the new robots to save the old. After that, in some remote future there will be robot fossil records. Alongside the relics of the Bell Beaker folk in a futuristic version of the Milton Keynes Museum, there will be the Starship Robot folk and a cracked recording of a faded robot voice, singing \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d<\/p>\n One Great Story: A Nightly Newsletter for the Best of New York<\/p>\n The one story you shouldn\u2019t miss today, selected by\u00a0New York\u2019s editors.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
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Who\u2019s afraid of grocery deliveries? The only troubling part is Google AI\u2019s suggestion that these robots were fostering a \u201clargely positive human-robot bond.\u201d Why only \u201clargely positive\u201d?<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/372e7e003660481b55bbb509e93f7f9aac-Milton-Keynes-02.rdeep-vertical.w460.jpg\")
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