Delivery Stewards Help Mitigate the Curbside Chaos of Autonomous Delivery

Tomorrow's New Today - A Dispatch from the Autonomous Delivery Future

California’s AI labor rules have created a new kind of human job: delivery stewards who accompany autonomous cargo vehicles through the awkward, exposed last fifty feet of delivery to manage the human interactions, safety concerns, and unexpected obstacles that the AI cannot handle..yet.

Marisol Ibarra was twenty-three minutes into her Tuesday route when the UPS Autonomous cargo van stopped in front of a daycare center, lowered its rear hatch, and suddenly stopped its otherwise routine disgorging of deliveries and started beeping loudly. It had gotten stuck because two traffic cones had been placed in the empty spot behind it to provide a buffer to help facilitate drop-offs during the morning rush.

The traffic cone was a common sight in the neighborhood, but the van’s sensors had not been trained to recognize it as a temporary obstacle. The van’s intelligence had decided that the safest course of action was to stop what it was doing and emit a disconcerting klaxon-like sound to warn nearby pedestrians. The klaxon’s unmelodious wail started a chorus of screaming and crying from the daycare children.

Autonomous delivery vehicles have been rolling through California’s streets for a few years, at first seen as curiosities that would solve businesses’ “last-mile” delivery problems — and then as a source of pedestrian rebuke and fodder for viral videos of human rebellion with delivery bots deliberately side-rolled and pushed into fountains. As one of the more visible harbingers of the AI-driven future, they have also become a flashpoint for labor advocates, insurers, retailers, and city officials who are trying to figure out how to manage the messy tension between AI entrepreneurs’ promises of cheap, efficient, and ubiquitous delivery and the public’s desire to preserve jobs, safety, and a sense of human dignity in the face of increasingly capable machines.