Recently, tragedy struck in Berkeley. As finals approached, Kiwibot, a local startup whose food-delivery robots have become fixtures of Berkeley’s sidewalks, sent out an email to users with the subject line “☠⚰️Kiwi is no more.”
Most people assumed that the company was shutting down. The bots, which wink and flash heart eyes at its passersby, had been slinging boba and burgers to University of California Berkeley students since 2017 (and since then, have deployed on several other college campuses.) The picnic-basket-size machines have become a sort of unofficial mascot for UC Berkeley students — people stop to take pictures with them and have plastered memes across Facebook groups. Students even once organized a candlelight vigil for one unlucky bot that caught fire on campus.
Despite the love many people have for Kiwibots, there’s also no shortage of people in Berkeley who want to physically fight them. I know this, in part, because I am one of them.
So, once the email with the coffin emoji landed, students flooded social media with lamentations for their four-wheeled friends even though — it turns out — Kiwibot was planning to end service only over winter break, not shut down entirely.
“RIP, kiwibots,” Angelica Simsuangco commented on the Facebook group Overheard at UC Berkeley. “U delivered more than just food to the people that ordered. U brought joy and laughter to every person u encountered. For some, u served as a life lesson that revealed either the kindness or cruelty of an individual. Thank u Kiwibot, u will never be forgotten 😔.”
As she hinted in her post, the bots have suffered some savagery. Tucked among all the commemorations lurked posts of a much different tone.
“What am I to kick over now?” Ben Eisenberg wrote on the same thread.
“WE HAVE WON THE WAR. WE ARE VICTORIOUS,” replied Kate LaMont.
Despite the love many people have for Kiwibots, there’s also no shortage of people in Berkeley who want to physically fight them. I know this, in part, because I am one of them.
Out of the 80,000 deliveries the bots have completed in Berkeley, vandalism was reported during about 1,600 of them.
Something about these impossibly cute little robots fills me with burning-hot rage. I want to kick one over and watch it struggle as its tiny wheels spin helplessly in the air. I do not exactly understand why I feel this way, but a good friend of mine once described the urge as “the most primal human desire.”
Of course, I never have — and do not endorse — kicking over Kiwibots. For one, the little guys have cameras and capture video of everything that goes on around them, and they’re certainly not worth being arrested over. Also important, the bots also aren’t fully autonomous. While they have some ability to stop from knocking into people, they’re actually supervised by overseas workers in Colombia whose lives don’t need to be made harder by people kicking over their robots.
But some people do act on these desires. In April, Berkeleyside reported that a local substitute teacher kidnapped one of the bots. Kiwibot CEO Felipe Chávez says that out of the 80,000 deliveries the bots have completed in Berkeley, vandalism was reported during about 1,600 of them. Chávez even recently had to stage a meeting with some high school skaters who were repeatedly harassing the bots.
“If we do a good job explaining why they’re important, people will feel ashamed to do any harm to the robots,” Chávez said. “It’s a matter of communication.”
Kiwibots have electronically displayed “faces” that can wink or blink hearts at people walking by. Chávez told me that the robots were specifically designed with these elements to give them a better chance at living in harmony with pedestrians.
In an effort to figure out why Kiwibots stir up such strong emotions of both love and hate in people, I called up Kate Darling, an MIT research specialist who studies humans’ emotional connection to robots. She explained that as babies, humans learn to respond to cues like movement and faces in order to separate agents (like a human being or a dog) from objects (like a rock). Robots are objects, but because they move and can have faces, they sometimes trick us into subconsciously believing that they are agents. This effect can cause people to perceive life and agency in robots, even if we logically know they can’t think or feel anything.
Companies that make robots know this, and can effectively yield this quirk of human perception by designing robots that we empathize with. Kiwibots have electronically displayed “faces” that can wink or blink hearts at people walking by. Chávez told me that the robots were specifically designed with these elements to give them a better chance at living in harmony with pedestrians.
“It’s very important to us to design our robots in such a way that people connect with them and feel comfortable,” Chávez said.
For Melissa Stevens, a UC Berkeley student majoring in gender and women’s studies, the design is working. She says that Kiwibots trigger an “affective response” in her, similar to what she’d feel while seeing a tiny animal.
“They are so cute!” Stevens said. “They roll around on their little wheels, looking like oversize toys.”
But if we’re biologically hardwired to see life in these Kiwibots, then why do so many of us still want to kick the little suckers?
According to Darling, if we perceive the robots as sentient agents but know that they can’t actually feel anything, some people might find it satisfying to release aggression by kicking them over. She noted, however, that cultural tensions surrounding the tech industry in the Bay Area may be more of the root of disdain.
“The Bay Area is a really tricky place to deploy technology because you get a lot of pushback,” Darling said. “There’s general cultural tension with the whole gentrification of the area.”
For the Berkeley residents I spoke with who haven’t fully succumbed to the Kiwibots’ charm, this seemed to be the case.
UC Berkeley’s associated student body, known as the ASUC, recently passed a bill condemning Kiwibot for its low compensation of overseas workers.
UC Berkeley graduate Michela Garber, for example, is actually fond of the bots (and didn’t express any desire to attack them). She described them as cute and “kind of iconic,” noting that they were a hallmark of her last years at university. But in a Facebook comment when the Kiwibots were thought to be shutting down, Garber wrote that she was “lowkey glad they’re dead.”
She explained to me over Facebook Messenger that to her, the bots have come to symbolize the gentrification and displacement that’s skyrocketing the price of living in the Bay Area.
“They’re so unnecessary,” Garber wrote. “It felt like as a working student I had no time for novelty, and it just left a sour taste in my mouth.”
Besides regarding them as unnecessary, many students, including Garber, take issue with the fundamental ethics of how the company is run. The Colombian workers who supervise the Kiwibots are paid less than $2 an hour, which is above the minimum wage for the country but still strikes many as unacceptable.
UC Berkeley’s associated student body, known as the ASUC, recently passed a bill condemning Kiwibot for its low compensation of overseas workers.
“Despite being above the mandated minimum wage, a wage of $2.00 USD per hour is not sufficient to support a dignified life and is not commensurate with the work performed by Kiwi Campus employees,” the bill states.
When asked about this, Chávez said he’s been in conversation with the ASUC senator who proposed the bill and is currently reviewing the wages that Kiwibot pays its Colombian employees. “I’m aligned with those values in Berkeley,” Chávez said. “If it’s the case that we need to increase the wages, I’m super-open to it.”
Still, the criticism of Kiwibot stretches beyond a single issue. Berkeley residents have also expressed discomfort with the bots’ potential to eliminate delivery jobs, block sidewalks, and capture videos of pedestrians as they roll along. And the fact that the robots aren’t actually fully automated eliminates much of their novelty and causes people to worry about who’s watching from beyond their “faces.”
In all, people have a lot of the same problems with Kiwibot as many do with the tech industry in general: they see it as exploitative; they’re nervous about automation replacing jobs; and they worry about their privacy.
Why so much fury? Tensions between a segment of Bay Area residents and the tech industry are deep-rooted and the source of a lot of fear, hurt, and anger.
The difference is that while a lot of new applications of AI stay inside tech buildings or in people’s homes, Kiwibots are right out there on the sidewalk, whether you like it or not, winking at you, taking up space, and occasionally knocking into your shins.
When tech is already taking over huge swathes of the city and pushing people out of their homes, it can be hard for people to swallow the fact that the industry has made a foray into the public space as well.
And history shows us that pretty much anytime that some kind of physical manifestation of the tech industry has shown up in public, it hasn’t gone well.
Take the SF animal shelter that discontinued its use of a security robot after people repeatedly vandalized it (the most thrilling example of which was people smearing the robot’s sensors with barbecue sauce) or the people in San Francisco who have tried to fight self-driving cars. Then there’s local favorite Instagram account @birdgraveyard (with 113,000 followers) that exists solely to document interesting cases of vandalism against e-scooters, including people throwing them off bridges, running them over with cars, and setting them aflame to then do kickflips over them.
Why so much fury? Tensions between a segment of Bay Area residents and the tech industry are deep-rooted and the source of a lot of fear, hurt, and anger.
Chávez said that he wants to open up communication with community members in Berkeley and help create a new culture in which robots are included and welcomed.
In the meantime, it’s still a common occurrence to see a bot get trapped, spurned, or tipped over in Berkeley. As long as cultural tensions continue, it seems that robots may continue to be the targets of the Bay Area’s ire. The Kiwibots have tried their best, but it may just be a problem too big for heart eyes to fix.
