The hook came in a tech-news roundup, and at first glance it was an amusing urban vignette: a 78-year-old Philadelphia woman had been arrested for blocking the path of an Uber Eats robot. But the more closely I read, the tighter the irony wound itself. The person arrested was Carolyn Marvin, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania (now retired), author of the classic book When Old Technologies Were New—about how late-19th-century Americans met the telephone and electricity with fear, rumors, and sabotage. A historian of technology selectively slowing down a new technology in real time. The police candidly reported responding to a call about “criminal mischief involving a robot”—even though not a single robot had been damaged. This is not a story about an eccentric old lady. It is a story about how, quietly, back in 2020, one paragraph in the traffic code turned a robot into a pedestrian.
The plot had been rehearsing itself for years. Since March, Uber Eats delivery robots have been operating in Philadelphia (they are made by Avride, Uber’s partner in autonomous delivery)—Philadelphia became Uber’s fourth city with the service. Their coverage area is Center City, between Race and Spruce Streets, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. And ever since March, whenever Marvin encountered a robot on the sidewalk, she did the same thing: she stood in front of it. She did not shove it or kick it—she simply stood there, moving with the machine if it tried to go around her. Ten to fifteen minutes of blockade, then she went on with her day. “I have a life, so I can’t spend a ton of time standing in front of robots,” she explained to CNN. The only harm caused by her hobby, in her own account, was that someone’s office lunch was “delayed by at most 15 minutes.” In September, one such standstill on Broad Street had already spread across social media; witnesses recalled her signature line: “No, I have to stop this. They’re taking over the world.”
On October 14, she was returning from a flu shot—with a jar of enchilada sauce in one hand and a container of chicken biryani in the other—and, as usual, encountered a robot in a busy part of town. She stopped. A larger crowd than usual gathered around her; some supported her, some cursed at her. Someone, Marvin suspects, called the police. Officers arrived in the 1200 block of Filbert Street, near Reading Terminal Market: they had been dispatched on a report of “criminal mischief involving a delivery robot.” The robot was intact—what was apparently being damaged was the order of traffic. The police later wrote that “officers repeatedly commanded the woman to move away, but she refused to comply.” The result: an arrest for disorderly conduct, handcuffs, and a ride in a patrol car. The height of the mundane: a symbolic protest against the automation of labor was suspended in favor of the symbolic object of automation, hurrying along with someone’s lunch.
The quote that made it into every article came from her friend: “Well, you got a disorderly conduct charge for impeding capitalism.” Marvin herself responded with professorial calm: “I was under the impression that I had more rights than a robot.” Will she continue? “Oh yes. But now I’ll be watching the police, too.”
The most interesting part began, Marvin admits, after the arrest—when she started reading up on what she was facing and what protected her opponent. And she discovered a legal gem worthy of its own lecture.
In November 2020, Pennsylvania passed Act 106—amendments to Title 75, the state’s transportation code. The law legalized “personal delivery devices”—ground-based devices for delivering cargo weighing up to 550 pounds (about 250 kilograms), operated remotely or autonomously. To accommodate them, the code acquired a separate chapter, a two-stage authorization system (first, an operator must be nearby—within 30 feet and in direct line of sight; then, remote monitoring with the ability to take control), $100,000 of insurance per incident, and fines starting at $500 for illegal operation. The state was not the pioneer: Virginia had been first, back in March 2017—a law pushed through with the involvement of lobbyists for the startup Starship Technologies. But Pennsylvania went further than anyone.
Because here they did something elegant. Rather than describing robots as a new class of transportation, lawmakers rewrote the very definition of a pedestrian. I quote: “Pedestrian” means “an individual afoot” (with caveats for powered wheelchairs)… “(3) A personal delivery device.” Subsection three. Legally, a robot is a kind of pedestrian, immediately excluded from the definition of a “vehicle.” Traffic must yield to it at crosswalks, just as it yields to a person.
Formally, the hierarchy remains intact: Philadelphia personal-injury lawyer John Mattiacci explained to CNN that in pedestrian areas, a robot must yield to people and cyclists. On paper, it is all very neat: the human on top, the machine beneath. In practice, though, it is telling who ended up in handcuffs and who calmly reached its destination. The legal fiction of “robot = pedestrian” works as a shield for a business model, not as metaphysics. When police arrive on a sidewalk and order a woman to clear the way for a robot-“pedestrian,” the hierarchy in the code speaks in the voice of handcuffs.
Now for the narrative spring that sent me digging into her biography. In 1988, Carolyn Marvin published When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century with Oxford University Press—a classic work in the history of technology, with more than 200 citations. Its subject: how American society absorbed the telephone and electric communication—noisily, absurdly, amid fears, rumors of deaths from electrical current, and attempts by professional castes to retain control over the new machines. Telephone operators and messengers, who lost their jobs to new exchanges and switchboards, played then the same role couriers play today.
In other words, Marvin spent forty years studying exactly what happened to her. This is not a contradiction—it is the method. She is not a Luddite out of a joke (the Luddites, incidentally, smashed machines; they did not stand in front of them), nor is she a technophobe: she formulates her objections with surgical precision. Her protest is against “corporate abuse of public space”: delivery work is being shifted onto low-paid people, whom automation simply removes from the equation; sidewalks are becoming testing grounds; and on top of that, the robots’ cameras survey the street around the clock. “Robots are generally encroaching on our lives,” she told CNN, “and public space is the most visible place for that encroachment.” Earlier, she had protested for civil rights, abortion rights, and against the wars in the Gulf and Vietnam. Robots are the same front line for her, just another chapter.
And here is the double bottom. Marvin’s own book describes how new technologies prevailed not through charisma, but through infrastructure: the right to lay wires, a monopoly on trunk lines, quiet legalization. The telephone did not ask society for permission—it was given a legal framework before there was any public consensus. Delivery robots in 2026 are taking the same route, only faster: the legal framework has already been signed; the public conversation has not yet happened. “There are things we need to do so that the government hears the will of the people,” she says. Is standing in front of a robot speech or action, expression or obstruction? The court will have to decide, but the charge has already suggested that the answer is apparently not in her favor.
The city where a hitchhiking robot was decapitated has a reputation. In 2015, the Canadian HitchBOT, traveling across America by hitchhiking as part of a social experiment, made it to Philadelphia and was found decapitated outside downtown: its arms torn off, its body mangled. The police did not investigate—the story of “a robot killed by ungrateful humans” went around the world at the time. A year ago in Center City, someone kicked an operational Uber Eats robot; the company offered a model of corporate meekness in response: “heightened curiosity around new robots is a known and expected phase,” and in such cases the robot will “simply stop and wait.”
Attitudes toward delivery machines shift in waves. Launch coverage brings affectionate wonder (LiDAR, GPS, 12 hours on lithium power, easing parking congestion); the comments bring skepticism. For a city with a centuries-old reputation as “the workshop of the world” and of civic conflict, it makes sense that the first place where a robot was slowed not by a kick, but by a methodical civic stance, would be Philadelphia. The September incident on Broad Street grows into the backstory of the October arrest—from “see how the robot reacts” to “I have to stop this.”
There is a separate thread here worth spending a paragraph on: virtually the entire regulatory framework that can get a woman arrested for standing on a sidewalk was adopted almost unnoticed. Virginia, 2017: a bill written for Starship passes in a matter of weeks; national media have time to note only “the country’s first law on delivery robots.” San Francisco responds in kind in December 2017: the local council says it outright—“not every innovation is great”—and bans robots from most of the city’s sidewalks, backed by disability-rights advocates tired of ramps and curb cuts being occupied. Pennsylvania, 2020: Democrats, unions, and accessibility advocates oppose it—job losses, danger to children and pedestrians; Republicans are for it and “for technological progress.” Governor Tom Wolf signs the law on November 1, 2020.
Three episodes—and one outcome: no voter chose to make a robot a “pedestrian.” This was a technical-committee decision, slipped through as a technical amendment to the traffic code. The flip side of legal mimicry is simple: for the business model to work without new categories and compensation, an old category is quietly expanded to absorb what an ordinary passerby plainly sees as a machine. There is no need to revise traffic rules, register a vehicle, or require city councils to create rules of their own—everything is already a “pedestrian,” everything is already allowed. Elegant. Too elegant, even.
Legal. The conflict between Marvin and Uber is not “human versus artificial intelligence.” There is only enough intelligence in there for a couple of navigation algorithms with LiDAR. The conflict is “human versus legal entity”: the robot is a transportation unit formalized in the code, with insurance, authorization stages, and a staff of remote operators. “Criminal mischief involving a robot” is a formula that, note, worked even in the absence of any damage whatsoever: the mechanism protects not metal, but the delivery schedule. The court case is still ahead—Marvin plans to defend herself through the First Amendment, and the very framing of the question is staggering: the First Amendment protects against the government, the sidewalk is public space, and the question of “can you stand in front of a machine” turned out in 2026 not to be rhetorical, but judicial.
Historical. The most interesting thing is that Marvin is, in essence, arguing with every version of herself from 1988—and so far, she is winning. In her book, the new prevails not because it is more useful, but because infrastructure decisions are made faster than public debate about them. She speaks now as a scholar, not as a rebel: not “robots are evil,” but “who will pay and who will benefit.” By her own admission, she does not hope to stop progress: “the effectiveness of my one-person protest is limited.” Her goal is more modest and more cunning—to make the process stop being quiet. In the 19th century, technological shifts came with electric shocks from wires, strikes by telephone operators, and panel discussions on morality; now the same substance is packaged in the statutory term “pedestrian” and a short quote for the evening news.
Human. Marvin’s protest is a rare genre: dissent with measurable harm (15 minutes off someone’s lunch), zero violence, and precise arguments. To arrest her required several officers, handcuffs, and a formulation involving a robot. The whole story, to my mind, fits inside her own sentence: “I was under the impression that I had more rights than a robot.” Impressions can be corrected. The question worth watching is: how many more categories in our code will be rewritten before we ask.
Sources: WPVI/6abc (City, “Woman arrested after refusing to move out of path of delivery robot,” October 2026; coverage of the March 2026 launch, September incidents, robot kicking), CNN (31.10.2026—Marvin interview, lawyer John Mattiacci, the friend’s quote about “impeding capitalism”), PennLive (19.10.2026, “I know they're taking jobs”), PhillyVoice (October 2026, Kristin Hunt), The Verge (October 2026, Terrence O'Brien), PA Act 106 (legis.state.pa.us—definitions of “pedestrian” and “personal delivery device,” authorization stages, fines, insurance), Oxford Academic (When Old Technologies Were New, 1988, more than 230 citations), CBC/Reuters (HitchBOT, August 2015), The Guardian and SF Board of Supervisors Ordinance 244-17 (San Francisco ban, December 2017), Vox/Retail Dive (Virginia law, March 2017).