‘A very good gadget’: taking delivery from the robots of Milton Keynes
Starship Technologies has been running six-wheeled delivery robots on the pavements of Milton Keynes for some time, and new UK legislation could allow the machines to expand to other towns and cities across the country.
Why this matters: Delivery robots are easy to treat as a novelty. They are also mobile sensors moving through public streets, collecting the data they need to navigate — cameras, object detection, location tracking. That infrastructure is already normalized in Milton Keynes before most people have had a chance to ask what data these machines gather, who owns it, how long it is kept, or what happens when a robot gets something wrong. The rules governing them on the road are only now catching up. The privacy rules are further behind.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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