Philadelphia Police Arrest a 78-Year-Old Retired Professor So a Robot Could Finish Its Delivery

Philadelphia has finally settled the oldest question in science fiction. When humanity makes its last stand against the machines, the machines will call the cops.

Police say they responded around 1:16 p.m. Wednesday to a report of "criminal mischief involving a robot" on the 1200 block of Filbert Street, near Reading Terminal Market. The mischief was Carolyn Marvin, 78, a University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus, standing on a sidewalk. The robot, an Uber Eats unit of the kind that has rolled around Center City since March, wanted to go forward. She wanted it not to. Only one of them could be charged with disorderly conduct, and it was not the one with a battery.

Marvin had just come from her flu shot. That is the most Philadelphia detail in recorded history: a woman protects herself from one threat to public health and walks straight out to confront another, this one battery-powered and carrying somebody's order.

Her method is ancient and undefeated. "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," she told Philadelphia's ABC station. Engineers spent years teaching the robot to avoid obstacles. Nobody taught it what to do when the obstacle has tenure and a point.

This was not her first standoff. She confronted one on Broad Street in September, and says she is not sure how many times she has done it. The robots hit Philadelphia's streets in March. She has been their speed bump with a pension ever since.

Officers asked her to step aside "multiple" times. She declined multiple times. A police department that survives Eagles parades was now negotiating a hostage situation in which the hostage was a lunch order, possibly cooling. Eventually they cuffed her, which makes her the first Philadelphian arrested for standing in a robot's way, a description the robot applies to everyone.

Marvin insists she is careful never to block the sidewalk to human pedestrians. That is the most precise civil disobedience ever practiced. She is not against people getting places. She is against coolers getting places. Thoreau went to jail over taxes. Marvin went over a lunchbox with GPS.

She calls it citizenship. "I'm exercising the rights of my citizenship, so I think of it in those terms," she said. The robot, for its part, is exercising the rights in its terms of service. One of them has read the Constitution. The other gets updated overnight.

Marvin, who once taught a course on freedom of expression at Penn, describes public opinion as "divided." Some passersby cheer. Others point out that customers paid for that delivery. Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment, which is understandable. Its spokesperson was probably stuck behind her.

She plans to contest the charge on First Amendment grounds and keep going. "It allows me to talk to people about what's going on," she said. That may be the real threat. The robot was built to remove the conversation at the front door. She moved it to the sidewalk.

The machines may yet inherit the earth. But in Center City, they will have to wait until a 78-year-old woman with a fresh flu shot finishes making her point. And as anyone who has ever had a professor knows, that can take the whole period.