Automated delivery vehicles are already on the ground in the UK

Automated delivery vehicles are already on the ground in the UK. The left needs to wake up.

Uber Eats and Starship Technologies have partnered to launch automated food deliveries in the UK. Rolling out in Leeds as of December 2025, robots will deliver takeaways and groceries. The automation company, Starship Technologies, touts that the deliveries “work profitably at city scale”. There’s no doubt about that. When labour is removed from the equation, the only costs are maintenance and energy. All of a sudden, capital has become labour — there are no potential unions or people in the way of a profit and jobs are being lost.

Is automated delivery progress?

Now, that actually could be progress. No longer are people having to take up their time cycling or driving around cities to convenience those with more disposable income. But it’s only a move forward if progressives step up and say: you’ve removed labour costs from your operation, so we want profit removed too. As such, a progressive administration should bring automated convenience services into public ownership through mandating government bonds to the companies at the market rate.

This is what Clement Attlee’s post-war 1945 government did in order to nationalise 20% of the economy. They didn’t want to seize private property and crash the markets. Rather, they used the democratic mandate from their manifesto in order to mandate prices for ‘assets’ they wanted to nationalise. Then, after a one-off payment to private companies, the government and the public received gains every year.

Younger generations take such convenience as a given and it’s a no-brainer for the government to invest here, especially as the service becomes automated. Removing the middleman between businesses and people would stop delivery services milking profits from both the restaurant and the customer.

Anything that centralises businesses in one place, providing convenience to people, should be considered digital infrastructure and owned publicly.

Fourth industrial revolution

In the years to come, all production and services will be automated. This will leave so many people without a job that a new system must emerge based on collective ownership of robots or some form of citizens’ dividend.

The thing is, China is miles ahead in the move towards the fourth industrial revolution through an active state that publicly invests, taking stakes in strategic high tech companies.

While the technology is increasingly there, it’s actually ideology that’s lagging behind. People may struggle to conceive of an automated system of luxury and are stuck in their ways.

Featured image via TechXplore

Tags: UK workers rights

Comments 1

Airlane1979 says:

5 months ago

Portraying the capitalist Chinese economy as far superior to that of Western states is to ignore massive, systemic exploitation of Chinese workers. From China Labor Watch:

Recent developments highlight a deepening structural contradiction at the heart of China’s labor and global economic strategies: while the state continues to expand its geopolitical and commercial footprint through record Belt and Road agreements and overseas industrial investments, labor tensions and human rights concerns, both domestically and abroad, are intensifying – without any meaningful policy response.

From a surge in protests across rural China driven by land seizures, mounting local debt, and deteriorating job prospects, to collective labor unrest at Chinese-linked mining projects in countries such as Tajikistan, these developments together indicate that the structural fractures in China’s current labor model are steadily widening. At the same time, Chinese companies are rapidly emerging as formidable competitors to Western brands by absorbing global supply-chain expertise, while also facing growing international scrutiny over risks associated with forced labor. China Labor Watch’s recent investigation into the collectible toy brand Labubu shows that the competitive rise of Chinese brands is not accidental, but rather the result of decades of experience accumulated through contract manufacturing for multinational corporations.

As China Labor Watch Executive Director Li Qiang wrote in a recent article published in The Diplomat: “What has changed is not the sweatshop system itself, but the function it serves: in the past, it primarily supported Western profits; today, it powers Chinese companies competing internationally.”