High minimum wages making robots more attractive - so San Fran considers banning robots

San Francisco's far-left population has been at the forefront of the battle for astronomical minimum wages. Currently, the area enjoys a $13.00 minimum, and most of the activists who line the streets would like to see it raised by at least a couple of bucks. That, as we've told you before, is making the idea of robots extremely attractive. Why pay a worker fifteen bucks (and worry about sickness, vacations, benefits, and demands for even more money) when you can just replace him with a kiosk or wheeled delivery drone? Apparently, no one in the Golden Gate city has a good answer for that question. So, Democrats are trying to do what they do best: over-regulate and ban. If you're going to lower your bottom line by replacing delivery people with robots, they're just going to have to outlaw robots.

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From the Guardian:

Order a delivery meal from a local restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission and Potrero Hills neighbourhoods using Yelp Eat24 and it might arrive at your door in a suitcase-sized wheeled robot. The tech company Marble’s bots use lidar, camera and ultrasonic sensors to avoid pedestrians and navigate pavements, delivering small packages and takeaway food within a mile or two, at walking pace. But if one San Francisco official has his way, every pizza the Marble robot delivers could come with a $1,000 fine and a jail sentence for its human controllers. San Francisco supervisor Norman Yee recently proposed legislation that would prohibit autonomous delivery robots – which includes those with a remote human operator – on public streets in the city. He told technology news site Recode, “our streets and our sidewalks are made for people, not robots.” He also worries that many delivery jobs would disappear.

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The city is doing its best to claim this is all about safety. They're super-concerned that these robots will be dangerous. Men, women, children and pets will be at the mercy of the drone menace, and their existence will not stand! Norman Yee, a member of the "party of science" has decided it's best to stop the inexorable march of technology now, before our future mechanical overlords start bumping into our ankles. I'm willing to acknowledge there are some legitimate, solvable, concerns there. But... The smart money is really on that throwaway line about jobs. These people know all too well that the ridiculous "fight for $15" is going to decimate entry-level hiring. It doesn't take a fortune teller to see the upside of replacing any replaceable $13-$15 per hour worker with a bot. The desire to ban robots before that starts happening is straight out of the left-wing social engineering playbook:

1. Enact unsustainable legislation.
2. Know that a workaround will present itself, solving the mess you created.
3. Ban the workaround, restoring yourself to unsustainability.
4. Take more from taxpayers.
5. Repeat.

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