I've been involved with delivery robots for a long time, and on my walk through empty streets yesterday, I noticed a certain irony. We have a desperate need for more delivery capacity, especially without humans handling packages, and teams have been working hard to make deliverbots safe enough to drive on our streets.

Now, when we need them, our streets are almost empty, and the robots could be safe, but there was no reason to aim for that goal, and they are not yet available at scale.

I muse some more about this in my new article at Delivery robots could have saved the day if the virus had come a bit later on Forbes.com