Oct 26, 2026
This is a good time of year for a monster story, and the tech industry has supplied several. Spooky, creepy, and downright scary AI-enabled bots are invading our screens, infiltrating communities, and roaming the streets. And they’re coming for you.
Muse comes with a major drawback: users aren’t just signing their own privacy rights away, but those of their friends and family as well.Insanity
As Wired reports, the AI agent keeps detailed files on people on the periphery of its users’ lives, regularly scooping up new information about them. These updates are reportedly coming once an hour, with an internal instruction for Muse to maintain a “page for every person in the user’s life.”
In American cities big and small, legions of similar machines are carting around takeout orders of sushi, pizza and White Castle’s chicken rings and testing the question of whether humans and robots can coexist.(The story also notes that “Serve Robotics, one of few publicly traded operators, lost more than $100 million last year. It brought in $2.7 million.”)
Early signs are not promising. Throughout 2026, Americans have kicked, tipped and walloped the food robots — the most tangible incarnation of A.I. to reach their front steps.
Within the past year: A crowd in Los Angeles encircled and pounded a delivery robot; a man in Miami tried to hurl one off a bridge; another attacked one in the street; in Sacramento, three men filmed themselves toppling and slamming a robot on the sidewalk, racking up nearly 2.5 million views on social media.
Serve’s privacy policy identifies these categories of data its robots may collect:• Delivery Robots Accused Of Scanning Customers’ Faces, Sharing Biometric Data (Associated Press, Oct 20, 2026):
- Video recordings
- Audio recordings
- Location and navigation data
- Obstacle-detection data
- Other environmental sensor information
. . . Serve’s policy confirms that collected information may be disclosed in response to subpoenas, court orders, or other lawful government requests. The policy specifically identifies footage of incidents, accidents, or criminal activity as potentially relevant material.
The battle over Chicago’s food delivery robots has reached the courts . . . two customers filed separate class-action lawsuits in Cook County court Oct. 9 against Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics, alleging the companies violated a state privacy law. They claim the companies’ machines scanned their faces and hands without their knowledge or consent.• Philadelphia Woman Arrested for Blocking Uber Eats Delivery Robot (Gadget Review, Oct 16, 2026). See also 78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot (Futurism, Oct 19, 2026):
Both companies dispute the allegations.
The lawsuits allege the robots’ cameras and LiDAR — a technology that sends out laser pulses to measure distances and map the surrounding environment — captured measurements of customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to retrieve their orders.
According to local channel 6ABC, 78-year-old Carolyn Marvin was arrested in Philadelphia’s Center City, after planting her feet in the path of an oncoming Avride delivery robot. Marvin, a retired communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told local reporters she was protesting the robots due to the threat they pose to local delivery workers.Who are the real monsters?
Earlier this month, Google was ordered by the Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) to temporarily stop work on Muhos and another site about 100km south-east in the village of Otanmäki after it failed to complete the necessary environmental impact assessments before clearcutting the land.(See also the summary by Futurism.)
. . . In addition to the 250,000 trees felled at Muhos, Annala estimates that an additional 150,000 trees were felled at Otanmäki. Because the trees have been felled illegally, she says wood from the two sites cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.
. . . Hanna Halmeenpää, chair of SLL’s board, said she had been incredulous when she discovered Google’s law breaking. “At first I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I have never heard that any company has done anything like this in Finland.”
. . . In Otanmäki, the disruption to nature and to residents’ daily lives is being vividly felt. When the trees were felled, the wolves who had lived there came to the village.
Lula’s camp said earlier this week it would file a complaint before the Organization of American States alleging that Meta, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, manipulated social media during Brazil’s election.• Former FTC chair Lina Khan on AI executives knowingly shipping defective, harmful AI products (AI Now Institute, Oct 21, 2026)
According to Lula’s party, some of his posts appeared without a share button, suffered reduced reach, and had stories that prevented reactions and sharing, in addition to appearing without audio or playing at accelerated speed.
Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine . . . Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.As one WSJ commenter put it: Musk “has blood on his hands.”