Domo No-rigato!

It's like fifth century Rome except
 the barbarians wear scarves...

What's up San Francisco? Like, I get it. Thanks to Apple and Google and wave after wave of start-up entrepreneurs, the city is suffering from an epidemic of rich people. Cocktails cost twenty dollars, eating out can run into the hundreds. The median home price is over $800,000 and the average rent for a one-bedroom is $3,460. Some people commute from, I shit you not, Bend Oregon. By plane. Because it's cheaper. Others are just leaving California altogether. I wonder sometimes if it isn't a lost cause and if the rest of the Bay Area shouldn’t just be done with it. Collapse the bridges, wall it off and abandon it to the gentrifying, fedora-wearing beardos.

And that sucks. It was a great city back when you could park there, but it's no reason to take it out on robots. Yeah, you heard me, they're taking it out on robots. And self-driving cars, which are sort of like robots. If you squint and have have a loose definition of the term robot.

KITT from Knight Rider: robot, or just a fancy car with a sassy onboard AI?
I suppose there are some questions we may just never have answers to.

"Hang on, I'll get my violin."

-An actual cab driver

Just straight-up throwing themselves at self-driving cars. According to The Guardian, there've been two separate incidents recently in which pedestrians attacked autonomous cars. Which I think begs the question: what's their problem? Are they afraid that the self-driving cars are the first step towards some kind of machine uprising? Are they worried about these things putting their Uber drivers out of work? Or is this just a misguided attempt to work out aggression by substituting violence against machines for violence against the wealthy?

Maybe they could rebrand
it as a sex toy for Gundams?

It's not just the self-driving cars. Remember the Knightscope 5? It too has been victimized by this wave of human on robot violence, getting kicked, knocked over and even covered with a tarp rendering it helpless which, since the thing is marketed as a security robot kind of makes me question its usefulness. But why all the attacks? Well, the Knightscope is apparently goddamn annoying, and one did run over a toddler once (relax, the kid was fine), but the car incidents went unreported to police, so we may never know what that was about.

While the motivations will be a mystery for the ages, I can't imagine this has anything to do with humans being threatened by automation. I'm not an economist, but wouldn't there have to be jobs available for robots to steal? Like, apart from the tech companies, jobs in the Bay Area are either something in the service industry or life coaching so until robots start reading Tony Robbins, we're safe, right? Goddamnit...

"The distance between your dreams and reality
is called action. Also, who had the salad?"

-The Robots, coming for us all