SANTA MONICA – If you live in the Mid City area of Santa Monica, you are probably used to being the guinea pig for companies that are trying out new products while pushing the technological envelope.
Over the past several years Santa Monica residents have witnessed Coco delivery bots cruising on the sidewalks while rushing to deliver food here and there. We have also seen the discarded scooters, such as Spin, Veo, Bird, Lyft, and Lime, strewn across the city streets and rotting in the sand on the beach. Driverless cars race through intersections and resist the urge to stop at yellow lights.
What is a pedestrian to do?
In Mid City SAMO, the recent invasion by new tech is from the Kiwibot. The Kiwibot is smaller then the Coco and more difficult to see. In the future, the Kiwibot hopes to deliver food around Santa Monica. Right now, they drones are being driven around Santa Monica ostensibly advertising for Charles Schwab.
According to www.kiwibot.com, the company website, the company hopes to make food delivery completely powered by AI. Without human interaction. Kiwibot portrays themselves as disruptors with the hopes of providing a product to the public that will help humankind.
According to two people working for Kiwibot, the company is based in Colombia. Further, the Kiwibots are drones that are being driven and controlled by operators sitting in Medellin, Colombia. That means, the drones are using the same spectrum and cellular frequencies the citizens of Santa Monica use.
During an interview with a Kiwibot employee, the employee confirmed the bots were controlled from Colombia. The employee said that the bots were not recording data on-board. However, when asked if audio, video, and data transmitted over the network was recorded and stored in Medellin, Colombia, the Kiwibot employee said that I should speak with the corporate office.
As of this posting, Kiwibot has not responded to our attempted inquiries. Finally, we called the city of Santa Monica to confirm if Kiwibot had a business license in Santa Monica. The city employee verified that Kiwibot is not registered to do business in Santa Monica. Moreover, the Kiwibot website does not list a business address in the United States.
Watch the video here.
