[Opinion] My Fight With a Sidewalk Robot

One after­noon last month, as I was cross­ing a busy four-lane street that runs through the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh cam­pus, I looked up to see a robot block­ing my path.

This wasn’t unex­pect­ed. Over the sum­mer, sev­er­al four-wheeled, knee-high robots had been roam­ing cam­pus, unmarked and usu­al­ly with a human han­dler sev­er­al feet behind. Recent­ly they’d mul­ti­plied, and now they were fly­ing solo. They belonged to Star­ship Tech­nolo­gies, I learned, an autonomous deliv­ery ser­vice rolling out on col­lege cam­pus­es across Amer­i­ca.

As a chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing Ph.D. stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh who uses a pow­er wheel­chair, I fig­ured it wouldn’t be long before I met one of these bots in a frus­trat­ing face-off on a nar­row side­walk. What I didn’t real­ize was how dan­ger­ous, and dehu­man­iz­ing, that sce­nario might be.

The robot was sit­ting motion­less on the curb cut on the oth­er side of Forbes Avenue. It wasn’t cross­ing with the rest of the pedes­tri­ans, and when I reached the curb, it didn’t move as the walk sig­nal was end­ing. I found myself sit­ting in the street as the traf­fic light turned green, blocked by a non-sen­tient being inca­pable of under­stand­ing the con­se­quences of its actions.

I man­aged to squeeze myself up on the side­walk in a pan­ic, climb­ing the curb out­side the curb cut in fear of stay­ing in the street any longer—a move that caus­es a painful jolt and could leave me stuck halfway up if I’m not care­ful.

Then I did what a lot of upset peo­ple do: I sent off a thread of angry tweets about the expe­ri­ence.

i (in a wheel­chair) was just trapped *on* forbes ave by one of these robots, only days after their inde­pen­dent roll out. i can tell that as long as they con­tin­ue to oper­ate, they are going to be a major acces­si­bil­i­ty and safe­ty issue. [thread] https://t.co/JHo5PlzMFs

— Emi­ly Slack­er­man Ack­er­man (@EmilyEAckerman) Octo­ber 21, 2019

The response was larg­er than I expect­ed: Mes­sages from around the world flood­ed my men­tions and inbox. Most expressed sup­port; some retweets asked oth­er uni­ver­si­ties to review their involve­ment in the same pro­gram and called for deep­er dis­cus­sion about the neces­si­ty of diver­si­ty in tech. A local news sta­tion picked up the sto­ry. After Star­ship and the uni­ver­si­ty reached out to me, I spent hours the next day talk­ing with their lead­er­ship teams. We dis­cussed what went wrong, the steps that had already been tak­en to update the robot’s pro­gram­ming, and the future of Pitt’s involve­ment in the pro­gram. After our call, Star­ship released a state­ment of com­mit­ment to the dis­abil­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty. Its robots were back on cam­pus four days lat­er, now under heav­ier human sur­veil­lance.

My inci­dent may have had lots of only-in-2019 ele­ments, but it was just the lat­est in a long fight for fair pub­lic access for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. The social move­ment gained trac­tion in the 1970s, when Den­ver activists host­ed a sit-in to protest the lack of acces­si­ble pub­lic trans­porta­tion, and Berke­ley grad stu­dents led a cam­paign for the instal­la­tion of curb cuts in the city. Though these efforts were suc­cess­ful on a small scale, acces­si­ble pub­lic trans­porta­tion, curb cuts, and oth­er accom­mo­da­tions weren’t guar­an­teed nationwide—and there­fore, didn’t hap­pen in many places—until the pass­ing of the Amer­i­cans with Dis­abil­i­ties Act (ADA) in 1990.

How­ev­er, any­one who’s lived under the ADA knows that it’s not with­out its flaws. America’s largest sub­way sys­tem lacks acces­si­ble sta­tions. Old­er build­ings and small towns nation­wide suf­fer from an acute absence of ADA-com­pli­ant infra­struc­ture. And com­mer­cial air trav­el still isn’t cov­ered by the ADA, despite decades of calls to action by the dis­abil­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty. The air­line indus­try is often in the head­lines for mis­treat­ing dis­abled peo­ple and mis­han­dling our adap­tive equip­ment. In Sep­tem­ber 2019 alone, 813 wheel­chairs and scoot­ers were dam­aged by the 17 most pop­u­lar U.S. air­lines.

Now, thanks to the pres­ence of these new deliv­ery robots, the reg­u­lar walk to my office has earned a spot on my ever-grow­ing “Things to Wor­ry About Dai­ly” list. But don’t mis­take this sto­ry for a protest against a sin­gu­lar com­pa­ny, or a warn­ing about our pos­si­ble autonomous future. In fact, the dis­abled com­mu­ni­ty as a whole could great­ly ben­e­fit from a deliv­ery ser­vice for food or med­i­cine.

Instead, my expe­ri­ence is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a much larg­er, evolv­ing prob­lem. The advance­ment of robot­ics, AI, and oth­er “futur­is­tic” tech­nolo­gies has ush­ered in a new era in the ongo­ing strug­gle for rep­re­sen­ta­tion of peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties in large-scale deci­sion-mak­ing set­tings. These tech­nolo­gies come with their own set of eth­i­cal design chal­lenges, with more unknown con­se­quences than ever before. And we have yet to have an hon­est, crit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion about it.

Whether inten­tion­al or not, inequity for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties exists at all scales, and each day is a fight to receive or main­tain fair access. Every­one knows what to do when a side­walk is inac­ces­si­ble, but the knowl­edge need­ed to address acces­si­bil­i­ty with­in exist­ing, com­plex tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems such as side­walk deliv­ery robots is spe­cial­ized. Too often, com­pa­nies are allowed to basi­cal­ly self-reg­u­late, which can come into con­flict with a “move fast, break things” ethos. (See, for exam­ple, how star­tups intro­duced dock­less elec­tric scoot­ers before ade­quate­ly prepar­ing their host cities for the side­walk-block­ing haz­ards their vehi­cles could be.) When tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment comes at the expense of a mar­gin­al­ized group in this cul­ture, it seems the best we can expect is a prod­uct update with a brief mes­sage of com­mit­ment to the com­mu­ni­ty. While this can be mean­ing­ful and result in pos­i­tive change, it’s not enough to erase the dehu­man­iz­ing and dan­ger­ous expe­ri­ences of those who inspired the change.

We need to build a tech­no­log­i­cal future that ben­e­fits dis­abled peo­ple with­out dis­ad­van­tag­ing them along the way. Com­pa­nies must prac­tice account­abil­i­ty from their posi­tions of pow­er. The most crit­i­cal step is increas­ing participation—not only by open­ing feed­back chan­nels with their users but also by hir­ing dis­abled engi­neers and pro­gram­mers in all stages of the devel­op­ment process. Acces­si­ble design should not depend on the abil­i­ty of an able-bod­ied design team to under­stand some­one else’s expe­ri­ence or fore­see prob­lems that they’ve nev­er had. The bur­den of change should not rest on the user (or in my case, the bystander) and their abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate their issues.

As we move into the autonomous future, it’s more impor­tant than ever to con­sid­er the social and eth­i­cal con­se­quences of how tech­nol­o­gy is designed. After all, tru­ly good design has to account for the fact that no two humans are the same, includ­ing no two mem­bers of any minor­i­ty group. A solu­tion that works for most at the expense of anoth­er is not enough. As an engi­neer, I rec­og­nize that this leads to very dif­fi­cult design ques­tions with no clear answer—a night­mare for peo­ple in my pro­fes­sion. But as a dis­abled engi­neer, I know that refus­ing to take up that chal­lenge will only per­pet­u­ate the cycles of injus­tice that are built into our world.

Publié le 19 novembre 2019
Par Emily Ackerman, Ph.D. student and disability rights advocate
Sur CityLab