{"id":161558,"date":"2026-04-09T16:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T16:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/161558\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T16:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T16:32:08","slug":"why-are-philadelphians-attacking-uber-eats-delivery-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/161558\/","title":{"rendered":"Why are Philadelphians attacking Uber Eats delivery robots"},"content":{"rendered":"

Love Philly? So do we. Let\u2019s be friends. Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lindsay Ouellette was pretty used to seeing food delivery robots before they arrived in Philly, having used them in experiments for her doctoral dissertation at Temple University.<\/p>\n

That said, she was still stunned to encounter her first Uber Eats delivery robot in the wild last month, rolling in front of her near the corner of 18th and Chestnut Streets.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was actually taken by how surprised and a little taken off guard I was,\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd I\u2019m not trying to harm them by any means, but I was just like, \u2018Whoa!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"An Uber Eats delivery robot navigates through pedestrians across Market Street. (Nick Kariuki\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

She then remembered researching all the stories and videos of people who did try to harm the delivery robots.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my mind, I was just wondering, is it only going to be a matter of time before people start acting a certain way towards them and abusing them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long at all. Within the first three weeks of the delivery robots\u2019 arrival<\/a> in Philly, videos emerged of people sitting on them, graffitiing them<\/a> and eventually kicking one over<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each incident drew a comparison to hitchBOT, the Canadian hitchhiking robot that had its journey across the U.S. prematurely cut short, along its head<\/a>, near Old City\u2019s Elfreth\u2019s Alley in 2015 \u2014 an event remembered 10 years later in the alley last October.<\/a><\/p>\n

HitchBOT gets lumped into an infamous list of Philadelphians destroying nice things, including the Portal\u2019s brief stint in LOVE Park<\/a>, the street poles of Broad Street after an Eagles Super Bowl win<\/a>. The list goes back as far as the first hot air balloon successfully flown in America in 1793 and later vandalized while in being stored Philly<\/a>. It also serves as a warning for future innovations like the Waymo self-driving taxis currently being tested<\/a> in the city.<\/p>\n

But is it fair to stereotype it as a \u201cPhilly thing?\u201d Ouellette and other researchers on robot abuse say no.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the perverse pride is a Philly thing. We see places outside of Philadelphia where technologies are vandalized like crazy.\u201d said Donald Hantula, a faculty member in psychology and neuroscience at Temple<\/a> who was Ouellette\u2019s academic advisor with Temple\u2019s Robot Social Navigation Amongst Pedestrians (roboSNAP) research team<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Lindsay Ouellette now teaches statistics at Temple, seen here with Donald Hantula, a faculty member in psychology and neuroscience at Temple. (Courtesy of Ouellette)<\/p>\n

\u2018The new cool thing on the block\u2019<\/p>\n

Both Ouellette, who is now teaching statistics at Temple, and Hantula pointed out that people attacking autonomous mobile robots has been happening all over the country, long before the Uber Eats delivery robots, powered by Massachusetts-based autonomous vehicle company Avride<\/a>, came to Philly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A quick web search produces a long list of examples of people being filmed or filming themselves attacking robots. The term \u201cclanker\u201d from the \u201cStar Wars\u201d franchise<\/a> has become a slur for AI technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"An Uber Eats delivery robot crosses (Nick Kariuki\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

Seeking attention and likes on social media is a big motivator, as it has become for many behaviors. Late last year notably,\u00a0 Austin-based company Social Robotics sued content creator IShowspeed<\/a> for damaging its \u201cRizzbot\u201d during a livestream<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In some cases, the robots have started hitting back \u2014 though unintentionally, we hope. Multiple delivery robots in Chicago have crashed through the glass walls of bus stops<\/a> and a dancing robot in a hotpot restaurant in California had to be restrained after its moves got too wild<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ouellette and Hantula also pointed out that the frustration and aggression aren\u2019t new \u2014 it\u2019s just been transferred from the things that evoked the same feelings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ouellette said that slow-walkers or people looking at their phones while walking had previously evoked similar frustrations to what people now feel about autonomous mobile robots.<\/p>\n

Hantula likened the delivery robots to \u201cMarty,\u201d the cleanup robot<\/a> that has been getting in the way of shoppers in Giant grocery store aisles for years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the robots weren\u2019t roaming our streets, the vandals and graffiti sprayers would have likely carried out their activities on\u00a0 bus stops and street signs. The only difference now is that there\u2019s a novel canvas that\u2019s popular on social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a baseline amount of that that goes on no matter what the target is,\u201d Hantula said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just that the Uber Eats delivery robots, they\u2019re the new cool thing on the block.\u201d<\/p>\n

But why would we want to attack robots?<\/p>\n

In Ouellette\u2019s dissertation, \u201cFrom Fiction to Friction: Abusing Autonomous Mobile Robots<\/a>,\u201d she created conditions to try and find out what motivated subjects to kick a robot. The experiments tested whether the aggression was a form of moral violence \u2014 where the aggressor sees the victim as deserving the kick, because it\u2019s malfunctioning or in the way \u2014\u00a0 or instrumental violence \u2014 where the kick is a means to an end, like a financial reward, in this case $100.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The results surprised her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cInstrumental violence reigns supreme, which was actually the opposite of what I thought,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought that maybe the robot malfunctioning would cause people to want to abuse it more, but it was actually the opposite \u2014 showing that these instrumental motives actually have a lot more power than a robot malfunctioning or these moral motives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another surprising finding from the studies was that efforts to make the robots appear more humanlike \u2014 like how Avride gave the Uber Eats delivery robot has eyes and expressions \u2014 alone did not make people less aggressive towards them. In other words, the robotics and AI industries\u2019 seemingly intuitive attempts to make their technology feel more human or anthropomorphized, to help people feel more at ease around them, may be in vain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"As a Temple PhD student, Linsday Ouellette came to Will Ellerbe came to the \u201cRemembering hitchBOT\u201d event at the Elfreth\u2019s Alley Museum. Ouellette was defending her dissertation on robot abuse a few weeks later. (Nick Kariuki\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that I found is that actually humanizing these robots doesn\u2019t actually act as a protective factor,\u201d Ouellette said \u201cPeople were willing to harm the robot [with human design features] about the same as one without human design features.\u201d<\/p>\n

Additionally, when talking with subjects who kicked the robots, dehumanization \u201cconsistently emerged as a mechanism normalizing harm.\u201d So efforts to imbue the robots with humanness created the conditions to dehumanize them, which is troubling.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the most profound drivers of aggression, cruelty, everything, is the idea of dehumanization, where we take people and we create ways to see them as not human, as less than human,\u201d Hantula said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From her findings, Ouellette suggests that, while fine-tuning the robots and technologies so that they get in our way less, further research and focus needs to go into how humans respond to robots on a \u201cbroader situational, cultural and cognitive\u201d level.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the Uber Eats robots, let them be rectangles on wheels. Don\u2019t try to turn them all into something like a C-3PO from Star Wars,\u201d Hantula said. \u201cBut let them be robots and let us be humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"An Uber Eats delivery robot stops for a curious child.(Nick Kariuki\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

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