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When Delivery Drivers Lose Their Jobs to Robots, Some Become Robot Wranglers

Meet human robot wranglers, flesh and blood people who tend to the delivery robots as they fumble around a city.

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If you’ve seen one of those little delivery robots roaming around town that looks like an autonomous cooler on wheels, you probably wondered what happens to it if it gets stuck or lost. A Los Angeles Times feature covers exactly that, and the answer is a bit depressing and certainly dystopian: human robot wranglers. That’s right, flesh and blood people who tend to the delivery robots as they fumble around a city.

The Times story largely follows a man named Charlie Snodgrass, a former delivery driver himself who used to ferry burritos around Los Angeles. Now he loads 27 autonomous delivery bots into a U-Haul before sunrise and dispatches them across the city. He is a robot wrangler, a job he had to take after the machines he services took his job. Now it’s just a countdown to when the machines can do all that stuff themselves, or at least most of it, thus removing the need for even his job.

Meet The Robot Wranglers, The People Who Maintain Delivery Robots

Companies like Serve Robotics and Coco Robotics are expanding their fleets across the country, specifically in Los Angeles, and hiring humans to babysit their machines. The job mostly involves swapping out batteries, wiping lidar sensors, upgrading their software, picking up robots after they’ve fallen over, and occasionally completing a delivery when a robot dies or a customer straight up refuses to leave their home or office.

In LA, wranglers can make $21-$26 an hour, which equates to around $ 45,000- $ 54,000 annually at the top end. It ends up being more stable than gig delivery work, but not good enough to survive in a pricey state like California.

Meanwhile, the robots themselves are steadily taking up the jobs that once kept gig workers, often migrants and older people, afloat.

As for the robot wrangler job, the workers interviewed by the LA Times say that I feel a bit like janitorial duty, but a job’s a job, and as long as servicing these robots continues to pay decently enough to scrape by, there will always be people filling these roles. After all, as the CEO of staffing company InstaWork told the Times, “It’s really impossible to roll these things out without humans.”

That is, until one day when it isn’t.

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