Pizza Hut and Driverless Delivery

Apparently Pizza Hut is a fan of Black Mirror.

Earlier this week, Pizza Hut announced its plans for a fleet of driverless delivery vans–an announcement which caught me off guard as I had just recently watched the Black Mirror season 4 episode “Crocodile” in which a man is hit by–you guessed it–a driverless pizza delivery van.

This news is both exciting and highly unsettling. As a lover of technology, I am always interested to see what kind of innovation is offered next, be it a Smart Home gadget or iPhone facial recognition. The cynic in me however is voicing the same objections as people who took to Twitter to denounce the news of the new fleet, arguing that driverless delivery vans would put hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

Pizza Hut has responded to the criticisms, stating “It could actually create more jobs by opening the pool of ‘drivers’ to those who do not own vehicles. They might act more as servers, focusing on hospitality.”

The news of driverless cars is nothing new. Ford, General Motors, Apple and Google, among other companies, have all allocated resources and funds into driverless cars. The question I want to raise is: How much are we willing to give away of ourselves to technology? We all know that it won’t stop at driverless cars; eventually, the whole service industry will be run by automatons.

It may seem Black Mirror is a little more on the mark than we’d like to admit.