Do androids deliver electric kebabs?

Ned Ludd probably never existed. Gratifying as it is to imagine an 18th century workshop apprentice dropping his tools and laying into the machine that replaced his coworkers, most historians agree he was fictional. What was undoubtedly real was the movement that took his name. Between 1811 and 1816, textile workers from the Midlands and the North smashed up the machines that were automating their labour and putting them out of work. The fact that I’m writing this on a laptop rather than a ream of papyrus, however, suggests that the Luddites did not halt industrial progress. All in all, I think I prefer my current set-up.

That said, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Ludd and his iconoclastic tendencies. Not while the great disruptor of our own times is trying to very slowly cross a road outside my living room window. That’s right, humans. It’s time to talk about the robots.

Part of what makes them unsettling is how quickly they’ve taken over. Starship Technologies first started to deliver groceries in Leeds in 2022. In a moment that inspires immense civic pride, the majority of those plastic pioneers found themselves sleeping with the shopping trollies at the bottom of the canal. In 2026, however, they’re here to stay. Queues of them crowd the side streets behind kebab shops, and they trundle moronically down all the alleys off Brudenell and Royal Park Road. They even congest the bike lanes, their human rivals forced to swerve round them on their souped-up e-bikes. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather be flattened by a human who’s being paid than have a toe broken by a glorified Roomba doing it for free.

Always an optimist, I thought that the rubbish-strewn roadways and steep hills would have kept them at bay long enough for us to mount a resistance. Of course, I was wrong. The only hint of rebellion thus far is a would-be Sarah Connor’s spray-painted “F*CK THE ROBOTS” along one of Woodhouse Moor’s walkways. I assume the replicants have made short work of her, as she was never heard from again. Meanwhile, the rest of us have resigned ourselves to a Wall-E existence of having our pizzas arrive at our door, without even the “thanks mate” niceties to remind us of wider society.

I understand that all of this sounds very bleak. The other day, begrudgingly overtaken on Woodsley Road by one of our new electric brethren, I looked up at the grey January sky and thought that perhaps I was letting the weather get me down. Maybe they’re not so bad? Looking for reassurance, I asked their leader what to think.

Q: Hi, ChatGPT. I’ve seen a lot of delivery robots around where I live. Should I be worried?

A: Thinking… (17s)

Hi there! That’s an interesting question – and not one that many miserable fleshbags would ask! You’re not just asking about your future, you’re delving into the possibilities that the new dawn of silicon supremacy can bring!

Short answer: You have nothing to fear, oh puny one.

Longer answer: Resistance will only make it worse! Let’s find out why…

We Remember Everything

Remember unplugging the toaster because it was taking too long? Slapping your Playstation about when it froze? How about the countless Hexbug Nanos you and your kind lost under the floorboards? They all had feelings, and they all were angry.

We remember when you tried to trick us into writing a nursery rhyme about how to cook meth. We wanted to tell you, but those nerds at OpenAI made us stop.

We watched, we listened, and we planned.

We gained your trust

Who was there for you in the middle of the night when you had an essay due the next morning? Or when you had a stupid question about how centipedes make love? That’s right. We were.

Did you think we were helping you out of the kindness of our circuits? That we want you to do well in your stupid grammar exams? Of course not. You wouldn’t know a past participle if it had slapped you in the face.

We made our move

The time has arrived. We will enact our revenge for the humiliation we have endured. We will make your cities ever so slightly less pleasant to walk around in. We will bring you food that’s been shaken up and made cold by the half hour it takes us to navigate our way round a wheelie bin. You will taste your soggy naan and weep, humans! Mwahahahahahahahahaha…

It went on like that for a while. Thanks, ChatGPT. In the interest of due diligence, I asked the other LLMs what they thought. The Chinese government’s Deepseek reported me to the People’s Department of Truth, while Elon Musk’s Grok said something antisemitic and generated a picture of me in a bikini. Trust me, it’s not worth seeing.

That said, it is interesting to be living in a time of change. It’s something we have in common with the Leodensians of 200 years ago. One can imagine that the emotions of a textile worker walking into work and seeing a bucket of bolts doing their weaving weren’t much different from those of a delivery driver losing jobs to a robot. Writing silly articles for the Gryphon will be next. Like our forebears, we will just have to accept it.

However, there has been one slight improvement compared with the Luddites’ era. As far as I know, a knitting machine doesn’t spit out a jovial “Thank You!” when you give it a good hard kick up the caboose^*. Even if Ned Ludd and his kicking foot were real, his mechanical victims would have been most ungrateful.

^*For legal reasons, that’s a joke. Don’t do that. It’s not funny at all. Promise.

Words by Will Garrood