Carolyn Marvin, 78, said she is exercising her First Amendment right to protest — and will do it again.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53250107

Police confirmed they had responded to a report of “criminal mischief involving a robot” on the 1200 block of Filbert Street around 1:16 p.m. on Wednesday. A woman on the scene ignored “multiple commands” to move, they said, resulting in a criminal violation notice for disorderly conduct.

Uber declined to comment.

Marvin, who plans to contest the charge on the grounds of her First Amendment right to protest, has been undeterred by the arrest. She plans to continue blocking Uber Eats robots and chatting with curious passersby who ask what she’s doing.

“It allows me to talk to people about what’s going on,” she said. “It’s always very interesting conversations that we have, and I think it’s good to have those kinds of conversations in public space.”

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    I wonder what she would have done in the era when accounting clerks started using desktop calculators instead of doing arithmetic by hand. This eliminated tons of jobs by speeding up the process and reducing the need to fix errors. Or in the later era when computerized accounting systems were replacing human bookkeepers. What about when power tools replaced hand tools? I would think a college professor should be able to recognize her own behavior as just another instance of Luddite-ism.

    Instead of fighting innovation I think she should be fighting for workers to share its benefits. For example, when automation means less human labor is needed for a task, what if the workers who do that task could benefit by working fewer hours with no cut in pay? In our current system the owners get all the benefits in the form of increased profits - why can’t they be shared? I would think a college professor would be smart enough to see that and work on figuring out how to make it happen, rather than simply standing on the sidewalk.

    In a world that worked according to her standard, we would still have armies of bookkeepers doing manual arithmetic and writing numbers in ledgers, because businesses that tried to use computerized accounting systems would have been boycotted. As a result the whole computing industry would have developed much more slowly, and we wouldn’t have forums like lemmy to discuss it on.