Dash it all! I’ve lost control of my delivery robot, someone must have hacked it. Now I’ll have to get on my bike and do the job myself.

It was great news when general purpose mobile robots became affordable and available to the general public. Gig workers like me suddenly became micro entrepreneurs. Instead of physically doing deliveries for DoorDash and Uber Eats, we could lease a small fleet of robots to do it for us.

They used to call us dashers; over 10 million globally who earned a living doing DoorDash and Deliveroo deliveries. And because we were ‘self employed’ most of us operated on multiple platforms. Gig workers like us thought the robots would take our jobs, but they just freed us up to become operators of very small businesses.

Like any business, you have challenges, like capital. The robot companies like Tesla helped, by offering leasing options instead of outright purchase. At least dasher bots can’t ask for higher wages or more charging breaks, so we don’t have HR issues.

But now we’re facing a new business threat. Our bots are being infiltrated and taken over by cyber criminals. Instead of mugging people doing deliveries, they just hack the bot’s operating system and redirect them. If you do get your robot back, the goods are long gone.

That’s the problem with general purpose bots. They’re designed to be harmless and interact with people, so it’s easy to con them into being compliant, which makes security difficult.

If I want to be a gigepreneur I’ll have to tough it out, and come up with some creative solutions. It sure beats being the worker!