Confused by baby goats, having car nightmares, struggling to move from LA to Miami Beach — Robots are just like us, exec says

They suffer from anxiety about aggressive drivers, get bewildered by exotic pets, and even experience a form of culture shock when moving from the West Coast to the East Coast. According to a recent presentation by an autonomous delivery executive, the artificial intelligence powering today’s sidewalk robots is navigating a set of struggles that feels startlingly human.

While the public often imagines autonomous robots as cold, calculating machines, the reality of deploying them in public spaces reveals a technology deeply concerned with social acceptance and survival. MJ Burk Chun, the co-founder and vice president of product design for Serve Robotics, addressed the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference with the argument that robots are just like us.

The ‘long tail’ of the baby goat

The trouble often begins when the machines leave the controlled environment of a simulation and enter the “wild” of city sidewalks, Burk Chun said. During a deployment in Los Angeles, the delivery team found that the real world was “even more dynamic than we expected.”

In one specific instance, a robot froze, “thoroughly confused about the ...