Seen In Atlanta

I suspect these are pretty limited to very densely populated "urban core" areas at the moment; I've never encountered one in Gainesville:

It's a delivery robot. Obviously size/weight limited to things like food or small Amazon packages, and presumably distance limited by battery life and terrain limited to environments with decent sidewalks.

The increasingly visible shift toward robots for local delivery, janitorial tasks, etc. has a lot of people upset, including some in my own immediate family/friend circle. They're taking people's JOBS!, etc.

My knee-jerk reaction is to recall that at every previous point in history, increased automation has resulted in:

1. Increased productivity; followed by
2. Lower per-unit prices; followed by
3. More jobs for humans because the first two mean that more people can afford the stuff being produced.

I've seen that in action at least twice.

When I worked at a boat trailer factory in the late 1990s, the assembly line employed, IIRC, 10 human welders. When six robotic welders were installed, five humans got laid off (or at least moved out of welding positions). But within a year, there were 12 human finish welders needed to keep up with the more basic output of the six robots. We were building more trailers because the company was selling more boats. I suspect that the "robot welder" thing had also been implemented at the company's boat plants, such that more boat/trailer combos could be produced at lower per-combo labor cost, which allowed prices to come down and more people to finally afford boats.

When I worked at a food plant in the late 1990s, the company replaced two people "dumping glass" bottles onto the hot sauce bottling line with one robot. That ended up creating four new positions -- an additional forklift driver position at each end of the line and two extra workers inspecting, taping, and stacking cases on pallets to be taken away. I happened to notice that the retail price of the product came down substantially, just as it was getting more popular anyway ("buffalo wings" were really catching on) ... which then resulted in an additional entire shift of production, with an entire additional complement of human workers.

Will the current wave of robotics and automation produce similar results, or have we reached a tipping point beyond which fewer and fewer humans will be involved in almost every design/production/shipping activity?

If the latter, will that result in some kind of socialist "Universal Basic Income" scheme, or will the human "working class" be starved off or otherwise liquidated to just leave the wealthy enjoying a robot support system, or something else?

As for the political end of things, automation and robotics and AI were always going to get better and better, but it seems to me that things like 1) minimum wage increases and 2) demands that gig workers be treated as employees rather than contractors provided big incentives for faster development. If you make it more expensive and less convenient to hire humans, those who need labor will look harder for ways to not need to hire so many humans.