The Droids Taking Over One of England’s Strangest Towns

Want to glimpse our robot-filled future? Just go to Milton Keynes.

On a languid summer afternoon, I drive to Milton Keynes, a midsize city 60 miles northwest of London and a few miles from my home. The plan is to meet my friend Ole, who has been texting me with increasing alarm about the number of robots rolling through the streets there. You should come see them for yourself, he tells me, and so I do.

Ole (a pseudonym) was an early cyberutopian, one of many who embraced the internet as a democratizing technology, overturning old monopolies and power imbalances. Then the internet was taken over by big-tech companies that established new monopolies and new power imbalances. Recently, he has begun to talk a lot about AI-enabled robots. How do humans fit into the plans of tech companies and aligned governments? And how will the widespread use of robots change our daily lives?

Read the full article on the New York Times Mag (behind paywall).