Another story about how minimum wage is hurting workers.
It was 8:15 p.m. and Jason Sylvain was drunk. When the 41-year-old man encountered Knightscope’s 300-pound K5 security droid doing laps in the company’s Mountain View parking lot, things didn’t go well—for either of them.
The large, pyramidal robot can’t have been easy to overturn. But Sylvain, whom a police spokesperson later described as “confused, [with] red, glassy eyes and a strong odor of alcohol emit[ting] from him,” persevered.
Upon finding itself topsy-turvy, the unarmed bot did what anyone would do: It called the cops and hollered for help. In response to the K5’s siren, Knightscope’s vice president of marketing, Stacy Stevens, rushed out of the company’s HQ and nabbed the assailant. Stevens later told CNET that the sloshed Sylvain “claimed to be an engineer that wanted to ‘test’ the security robots.” He added, “I guess he now has his answer”, writes Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Automation is good. It increases productivity. It makes stuff cheaper. It frees up people to work in other areas where they will provide more value. The fact that it’s happening now demonstrates only that wage regulations have unintended consequences, not that robots are bad.