Obsessed with Delivery Robots

Why I’m Obsessed with Delivery Robots

Every time I see one of those little delivery robots rolling down the sidewalk, I can’t help but think: they’re not just cute gadgets. They’re signals. They say a lot about the transitions we’re going through — in work, in economics, in institutions, even in governance. They’re like tiny emissaries of the future.

I think you can understand what they represent in four “feasts” — four courses of a much larger meal that society is being forced to eat.

Feast One: Workflow Capture

Most of us aren’t “doing jobs” in the old sense anymore. We’re executing workflows. Gig drivers, customer support reps, junior analysts — they’re all following scripts, protocols, checklists. In many ways, we’re biological APIs, human plug-ins for digital systems. The robots are a reminder that the workflows themselves, not the people executing them, are the real focus of optimization.

Feast Two: Cognitive Offloading

This is what the robots literally are: offloading tasks from people onto machines. What starts with food delivery extends everywhere — scheduling, customer service, basic analysis. AI eats the bottom rungs of the ladder first, just as people are burdened with student loan repayments for degrees tied to jobs that may not even exist anymore. The tragedy is that at a national level, there’s almost no safety net or serious plan for this transition.

Feast Three: Institutional Unbuilding

Work has always been propped up by institutions: schools, research labs, visa programs, funding pipelines. And yet, at the very moment when we need those supports most, they’re being dismantled. Science budgets are slashed. Student visa programs are politicized. Regional universities are collapsing. Even Harvard — one of the world’s top research institutions — is under constant attack. When the scaffolding of knowledge and workforce development is falling apart, who’s left to manage the transition?

Feast Four: Platform Power

Here’s where things get surreal. Platforms are becoming more powerful than institutions, and money is the new lever of governance. You can buy access, buy protection, buy legitimacy. Crypto-dinners, meme coins, tokenized politics — it’s computational governance, where the interface between citizen and state is not democracy, but algorithms, engagement metrics, and incentives. The robots on the sidewalk aren’t just about cheap labor replacement; they’re about what it means when platforms become the true operators of society.

Delivery robots may look small and harmless, but they’re artifacts of a massive economic and social transition. They remind us that structures are shifting fast, incentives are clearer than ever, and yet the future is still unwritten.

That’s why I’m obsessed with them. They’re not just robots — they’re the breadcrumbs showing us where the system might be going next.