The Droids Taking Over One of England’s Strangest Towns

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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?

At the moment, there is no better place to answer those questions than Milton Keynes, which for the past seven years has been the site of a major robot-human community outreach project. Before driving over, I ask Google about these robots. The AI overview barges in and immediately answers:

Milton Keynes is home to a successful fleet of Starship delivery robots that deliver groceries and food, fostering a largely positive human-robot bond. These cute, little robot characters coexist with humans on the city’s wide footpaths, operating in an “awareness bubble” to signal their presence and offer thanks for assistance.

Cute little robots, offering thanks. That doesn’t sound too bad. Starship Technologies, I learn, was co-founded by Ahti Heinla, an Estonian computer programmer who was formerly the chief technical architect of Skype. In 2013, Heinla led a team of engineers participating in the NASA Sample Return Robot Challenge. Their goal was to create a robot that could collect space stuff: Mars dust, moon rocks. The following year, Heinla and another Skype alumnus, Janus Friis, founded Starship with the idea of repurposing these robots for deliveries. Starship’s current fleet includes 2,700 robots, which have completed more than 9 million deliveries worldwide — and 915,000 in Milton Keynes.
 
Who’s afraid of grocery deliveries? The only troubling part is Google AI’s suggestion that these robots were fostering a “largely positive human-robot bond.” Why only “largely positive”?

The pub Ole chooses for our meeting has a garden surrounded by banks of feathery trees. There are lots of swallows fluttering from the eaves, soaring across the fields. Ole says the robots are everywhere in Milton Keynes these days. “They deliver hot food and groceries,” he says. “At least, that’s what we’re told they’re doing.” The Starship robots are 99 percent autonomous, but if the world gets too complicated, too unpredictable, they connect to a human minder. They were first trialed in places where not too much happens. Low-density places like office parks and planned communities. Milton Keynes, by that measure, was the perfect terrain.

The British government conjured the city out of thin air in 1967, a planned community built on parkland joining several smaller towns. In the 1980s, there was an advertising campaign (“Wouldn’t it be nice if all cities were like Milton Keynes?”) that presented the city as the perfect place for a new beginning. Such optimism was widely satirized. In 1985, the Style Council released a song called “Come to Milton Keynes” which describes a superficially idyllic “nice new town” with an undercurrent of “insanity” and “slaughter.” There’s always something odd about utopias, Ole says. They’re perfect. And real life is never perfect. So they’re always quite unreal.

“Now Milton Keynes has become the site for another experiment,” Ole says. “This time with robots.” He suggests that the Starship robots were designed to look unthreatening and low tech, even though they were equipped with ultrasonic sensors, radar, and state-of-the-art obstacle detection. Their neural networks identified and labeled objects so the robot could respond accordingly: Tree. Human. Fellow Robot.

“Don’t let them cute you out,” Ole says. “That’s their plan. They lure you in with a plea for help then … they cute you out. You start speaking to them as if they’re your little robot pal. Be careful.”

Shortly after saying good-bye to Ole, I encounter my first robot. I decide to have a quick stroll before heading into the center of the city, so I wander over to Bletchley Park, a mansion in the suburbs of Milton Keynes where Alan Turing and others worked during World War II on proto-computers to decipher German codes. It’s now a museum.

As I walk toward what I think — erroneously — is the entrance to Bletchley Park, I meet the robot. It’s both surreal and somehow instantly ordinary. A small robot, out and about in an English town, passing a line of picket fences and neatly tended gardens. Starship has designed what is essentially a box on six wheels, about the size of a medium suitcase. It has headlights where it might have eyes, if it had eyes. Despite all the vanguard tech that Ole told me about, the robot seems to be having trouble. It’s trapped in the gutter, trying to scramble onto the curb. It’s too small, or the curb is too high, or both. At one point, it articulates its wheels — this looks impressive but doesn’t help. The robot slides off the curb, falls into the gutter again.

Then it says: “Can you please help me back on the sidewalk?”

Around us: silent houses with blank windows. It’s just me and the robot.

“Er, okay,” I say. “I’ll have a go.”

I make a tentative attempt to push the robot back onto the sidewalk. It’s surprisingly heavy. Then I see a woman in a gray coat approaching us — by “us” I mean “me and the robot.” She pauses only for long enough to jettison a friendly remark: “Those robots have minds of their own!” Then she hurries onward.

“Could you please help me back on the sidewalk?” the robot asks again. It’s undoubtedly just my imagination, but it sounds impatient.

“Sorry,” I say to the robot. “I’ll try harder this time.”

It takes several further attempts but eventually I manage to shove the robot back onto the sidewalk. As soon as it has regained its footing (not the right term; it has no feet), it begins to glide away, narrowly avoiding a beer can, almost falling off the curb, rebalancing again. It makes a futuristic high-pitched whining noise, but the main verb that springs to mind, with reference to its movement, is trundling.

“Thank you,” says the robot. “Have a nice day!”

I follow the robot for a while, at a polite distance. It’s easy enough to keep up, because the robot spends a lot of time pausing on the edge of one road or another. Perhaps it’s checking the map, or perhaps it’s awaiting instructions from the central robot mind. Perhaps it’s trying not to fall off the curb again. There are kids walking home from school in little sociable groups, kicking balls, laughing. The robot trundles past, but they ignore it.

I ask a couple of them — What do they think of the robots?

“They’re funny,” says one kid. “My dad uses them when he wants food and stuff but can’t be bothered to go to the shop.”

“They speak like Americans,” says another. “Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes they don’t say much.”

“My dad told me one got hit by a train. It blew up everywhere,” says the first kid. “Also I saw one by the side of the road the other day. It had been hit by a car.”

“Do you see lots of robots around in general?” I ask. “Whether squished, or blown up, or not?”

The second kid shrugs. “Depends,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t see them for days. Then, sometimes, they’re everywhere.”

Why are the robots here at all? I know it’s a planned community, but it still seems an odd place to choose as the robot bridgehead on Earth. But as I drive from Bletchley into the city center I think, Well, maybe it’s not so strange after all. Milton Keynes was designed by a team of brilliant young architects (Ole called them hippies) who imagined a town of 250,000 people. The original plan encompassed nearly 22,000 acres of Buckinghamshire farmland, including villages such as Bletchley, Wolverton, and Stony Stratford.

The idea was not to demolish these preexisting places but to draw them into a massive road grid: an idea derived from American urban planning. The town was then structured into a series of “grid squares.” Some were for residential areas; some for retail or employment parks; some for green spaces, each linked by fast, wide roads. The aim was to ensure “community without propinquity,” a phrase taken from Melvin M. Webber, author of the seminal paper “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm.” (I don’t know what that title means either.) English towns usually emerge slowly over centuries or millennia. Milton Keynes went from idea to reality in a couple of decades with most of the construction finished by the late ’80s and the town declared complete in 1992.

Despite its origins, Milton Keynes doesn’t feel uniformly modern. It wasn’t built in the middle of the desert; it was built on and around a collection of ancient villages and farms. When the plans for Milton Keynes were approved, a full archaeological investigation was commissioned before any construction work began. Layers of buried history were revealed, often from previously unknown sites: Iron Age settlements, Roman villas, Saxon roundhouses, medieval estates. At the Milton Keynes Museum, in Wolverton, some of these relics are displayed: a Bronze Age ceremonial sword, a Roman mosaic, ancient coins, weights, looms, toys, jewelry, relics of the Bell Beaker people from the Early Bronze Age.

The young architects knew all of this, and they wanted to relate Milton Keynes to the deep history of England. The city’s three main boulevards are named for ancient ruins and mysterious ritual sites. The road I’ve parked on in the city center is Silbury Boulevard, named for a great neolithic mound in Wiltshire. The next road over is Midsummer Boulevard, which aligns with the rising sun on Midsummer Day — a deliberate echo of another British neolithic site — Stonehenge. After that: Avebury Boulevard, named for the great stone circle of South West England.

I think about how these ancient energies may have merged with technocratic attempts to build the perfect city. Milton Keynes is very green with beautiful parks and endless trees. Owing to this dense foliage, you rarely see buildings from the road grid, so it feels as if you are driving through a forest, onward, forever. Or as if civilization has already collapsed and nature has reclaimed its territory.

I walk from Silbury over to Midsummer Boulevard, where there is a nearly 50-year-old mall formerly known as the Shopping Building. Inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, it was opened in September 1979 by Margaret Thatcher. I summon a robot to meet me there using the Starship App. Of course, that’s how the robot invasion works: You download an app and order some groceries. You can select a variation of the standard robot from a series of options: a grumpy one, a well-dressed one with a bow tie, a tuneful one that sings “Happy Birthday.” I select the tuneful one.

Soon enough, the Starship robot appears, glowing orange in the fiery dusk. It stops outside the Shopping Building, looking small and plaintive beneath the massive mall. The Milton Keynes locals are accustomed to the robots, but the tourists here are not. Someone says, “Is that actually a robot?” I say, “Yes, it is.” Another person says “I must call my wife and tell her. Do you mind if I film it?” I say, “No, go ahead.” Everyone waits as I faff around with my phone. The robot waits in a different way.

I swipe on the app to open the robot and release my groceries. Its interior resembles a cooler with my groceries in ordinary plastic bags. I remove the bags, close the lid. Then the robot sings “Happy Birthday.” The noise doesn’t come from its mouth. It has no mouth. The atmosphere of the crowd changes a little. There’s some bemused muttering, then someone speaks to me — a bearded guy with glasses. “It’s your birthday?” he asks. “That is seriously nuts.” I try to explain that it’s not actually my birthday; this is research. The man smiles politely.

The crowd stops filming, disperses. The man on the phone to his wife moves away. “A robot sang ‘Happy Birthday,’” he says. “And it wasn’t even anyone’s birthday.”

Throughout the summer, I return to Milton Keynes. Sometimes I go with Ole. Sometimes I go with other friends. Sometimes I take my kids along. We meet robots, and we meet people and ask them about the robots. A few stories we hear several times, tales from the robo-lore. A robot was once found, “injured,” by the side of the road. A kind person had carefully placed it on its side in the robo-recovery position. The following day, the robot was gone.

My kids like the robots, think they’re cute, but also worry about them. “Are the robots happy?” they wonder. Is this the wrong question to be asking? They try to instruct and encourage passing robots or robots we’ve summoned. “Go left, no, not there. That’s the curb. Watch out.” The robots submit with (apparent) good humor to this impromptu robot-minding. Just once, a robot asks my daughter, “Excuse me, could you please let me pass?” She steps aside; the robot rolls off. It doesn’t say “thank you.” Perhaps it’s had enough of humans for one day.

At the supermarket, I talk to people as they come and go, holding bags of shopping, urging their kids along, or speaking on their phones. The robots hang around in the car parks, as if awaiting orders from their alien mother ship. Suddenly one of them is activated. A shop assistant puts some bags in its cooler, shuts the lid. The robot spins around and heads off into the grid, along the neolithic boulevards. Through the past, present, into the future. My son takes photographs.

I ask a shop assistant where the robots sleep. “They don’t stay here overnight,” he says. He’s in his 20s with curly auburn hair. “Each evening they’re picked up by van and taken away. I’m not sure where they go. But when I get into work at 7 a.m., earlier, they’re always here again. Waiting.”

One woman tells me she thinks the robots are “a pain in the arse.” Then she checks herself, glancing surreptitiously at the robots, as if she might have offended them. “No, no, that’s unfair,” she says. “They’re very popular. People order from them all the time. I just meant that they’re a pain in the arse because they’re so efficient, people don’t come out shopping anymore. A friend of mine, he only lives opposite, he just gets a robot to do everything.”

Other adjectives from other customers include: useful, adorable and … cute.

A muscular, thickset guy is standing in the car park, eating an ice cream. I ask, “What happens if someone tries to smash up the robots? Or tries to steal them?” He looks at me as if I might be planning something.

“Oh, they scream their heads off,” he says. “Well, you know, they don’t have heads. Or mouths. But it’s incredibly loud.”

It reminds me somehow of a Harlan Ellison short story from the 1960s, “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream.” In that story, an omniscient AI has taken over the world. The I of the title is a human who is trapped forever in this hell, commanded by the AI.

Another day, I drive back to Milton Keynes again. The Style Council song runs in my head: “In our paradise lost we’ll be finding our sanity / In this paradise found we’ll be losing our way.”

It’s a bright, hazy morning. The summer has been wildly hot. This morning I park next to a step pyramid: a massive metal building in the center of town. People call it the Point, and apparently it was once a cinema, but it looks more like another ritual site. It’s a short walk to Hotel La Tour, a high-rise hotel where I’m meeting Ole. There aren’t many high-rises in the city, and I’ve been using it as an orientation point for weeks, but now Ole has decided that we should ascend to its highest floor and admire the view. Also, their halloumi burgers are delicious.

Ole is right about the view: It’s incredible. On one side there’s an urban panorama of the gridlike city, a place of wide boulevards, concrete, and glass. On the other side there’s a view of the countryside, extending to the misty horizon.

Ole says that there’s an intriguing thing about Starship. One of its investors is Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian like Heinla and also formerly involved with Skype. More recently, Tallinn co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. Tallinn has warned in public about the dangers of unaligned godlike AI — meaning AI that exceeds human capabilities and doesn’t share our goals. At a speech at the Oxford Union in 2023, Tallinn talked about how large language models such as ChatGPT aren’t really “pretrained” but “summoned”: “a two-page program is soaked in terabytes of data and megawatts of electricity and left like that for months.” Then, attempts are made to “tame the emergent alien mind,” said Tallinn. Ole found these warnings quite striking. Tallinn suggested that this sort of AI required regulation and should perhaps be banned outright, like human cloning was banned. The situation was urgent, he said.

“It’s interesting to me that one of the investors in Starship is warning against an AI apocalypse, which would potentially include an AI-robotics apocalypse,” says Ole. “Perhaps Starship is actually sending their robots to defend us against the emergent alien minds?”

I suggest that it might be quite hard for the robots of Milton Keynes to defend the people of Milton Keynes against godlike unaligned AI. They’ll do their best, no doubt. But, to be honest, the godlike AI would just create towns with lots of steps. Then the battle would be over.

Outside the hotel, I meet a Starship robot trundling along the pavement. I watch it pass, busy with another errand. Then it crashes into a metal bollard with a loud, slapstick clang! It stops, perhaps belatedly trying to recognize this object. A man walks along with a dog — which barks wildly at the robot, as if to add insult to injury. The man says, “Hey, no need for that.” The dog stops barking. The robot reverses and turns, moves away again, this time avoiding the bollard.

“Hey, excuse me,” I say to the guy with the dog. “Are you from Milton Keynes? I mean do you live here?”

The man, in his 30s, looks at me a bit suspiciously and says, “I live here, yes. Why?”

“I’m just trying to find out about the robots, how people feel about them. I live just outside MK, but we don’t have robots in my village. Not yet, anyway.”

“They don’t bother me,” he says. “They’ve been here for ages. They help people do shopping. For some reason my dog hates them. She thinks they’re coming to get me or something, so she barks to warn them off.”

“Does she ever attack them, preemptively?”

“No, never. But she doesn’t trust them. They move quite fast, with purpose. They always have a route, they really go for it. If you get in their way, they dodge around you, carry on. It’s a bit relentless.”

I notice the man is wearing a badge on his lapel, an old punk slogan: “No Future.”

In mid-August, the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games takes place in China. Humanoid robots from 16 countries compete in events including martial arts, soccer, track, and dance. A Chinese company called Unitree dominates the competition, winning four gold medals in the track events.

I watch the Games from the English Lake District, where I’ve gone on holiday with my family. The clips of the humanoid robots make me think almost fondly of the robo-boxes I saw at Milton Keynes, which periodically relied on assistance from strangers. Starship seems to have a hopeful view of humanity, assuming that we will help the robots and not steal them, or punch them, or generally be unkind to them. It’s a vision of the future that is also quite old-fashioned — like Milton Keynes.

With this in mind, I speak to Ahti Heinla, the CEO and CTO of Starship. We meet in a cyberroom; Heinla is witty, passionate about his robots. He believes the cultural acceptance of Starship robots is vitally important. Heinla says, “Our earliest question was: What would it take for the robots to be liked?” At first, they wondered if the robots should be humanlike, so they could “blend in the most.” But, he adds, “it is a well-known concept in robotics research that if the robot tries to be too much like a human, then actually people don’t like it. It’s too much, too strange.” After Starship rejected the idea of humanoid robots, the company wondered about making the robots “cool, futuristic, like a spaceship,” according to Heinla. In the end, “we realized we wanted to create a box, but it had to be a box that is liked.”

When they first came to Milton Keynes seven years ago, the robots could only operate in a place with wide sidewalks and long flat stretches. Now, says Heinla, their robots can operate almost anywhere. Perhaps not in Southern European cities or on Greek islands, places with countless steps. But almost everywhere. “London’s Soho on a Friday night?” I ask. “Yes,” says Heinla, “that would be fine.”

I mention that the robots have soft, gentle voices. They’re taciturn, nonconfrontational. “Was that a deliberate decision?” I ask Heinla.

“Yes, I think so,” says Heinla. “We wouldn’t want to annoy people. Maybe in the future it becomes a cultural norm that the pavement is full of chatty robots, but I don’t think that’s the norm right now.”

“How significantly has the software changed since they began development a decade ago? Which developments in AI have been most critical?”

“From the outside our robots have stayed almost exactly the same,” says Heinla. But internally, “they have changed a lot. There has been a bit of an explosion of different sensors, to enable the robot to understand what’s around the robot. Also machine learning has developed a lot. For example in terms of visual recognition — is this a person, or is this a car, or a bicycle? Some of the key technologies were in their really early stages ten years ago, compared with where they are now. But also our robots are not built in a way that we put an LLM in the robot and ask whether it should drive left or right — that’s not how the robot works. It would be hard to make it safe.”

This reminds me of Jaan Tallinn’s speech. Both Tallinn and Heinla grew up in Estonia, under the collapsing utopian fantasies of Soviet Communism. I put this to Heinla — one of his investors is quite averse to runaway AI. Does this influence his own thinking? Heinla speaks with great warmth about Tallinn.

“He was my desk mate in high school!” he says. Their shared background seems significant in how they think about the future. “Estonia doesn’t really have the culture of trying to take over the world,” Heinla says. “I think Jaan doesn’t want to take over the world. I don’t want to take over the world. We want to be useful to the world. There’s lots of stuff going on and people are racing to create a future but they don’t quite know what that future will actually do. I think we know exactly what our robots do.”

Ole is in touch: He wants to meet in Milton Keynes again. It’s another beautiful day. The dahlias have come and gone — earlier than ever. I decide to leave my car in the city center and cycle over to Bletchley Park. It’s a stunning bike ride, along the old Grand Union Canal. Narrow boats moored at intervals, elliptical graffiti on the bridges. At Bletchley, I peer through the iron gates at the buildings where Turing and others worked through the war, using vanguard technology to save countless lives.

Then, I summon a robot. I’m interested to see if it has since learned to “do” the curb, if new information has been annotated on its maps. The robot comes along soon enough. I open the lid, take my delivery (more groceries), send the robot away. It rolls onto the road and … gets stuck. Now it articulates its wheels, which still looks impressive but still doesn’t actually help.

It says: “Can you please help me back on the sidewalk?”

There’s no one else around. Just me and the robot. Again.

“Do you remember me from last time?” I ask.

The robot doesn’t reply. Perhaps it’s already identified me. Human. Oh no, that one again. Bollocks. I manage to shove it back onto the sidewalk. After reestablishing its footing (still not the right term), it glides away, avoiding another beer can. This time, it stays well away from the edge of the curb. I wonder if that’s robo-psychogeography or robo-luck.

“Thank you,” it says. “Have a nice day.”

I go and have a drink with Ole, in the same pub as before. The swallows are still soaring from the eaves, fluttering across the fields. It’s nearly the end of the summer, the precious final days of August. Soon the swallows will fly south.

Ole asks what I’ve learned from the Milton Keynes experiment. I tell him that the well of the past is very deep — some might call it bottomless, as Thomas Mann once said. Milton Keynes began as a utopian experiment, yet from the outset the architects understood that their immaculate grid was laid out on ancient land.

Starship is very clever with their robots; they understand that humans aren’t too keen on glittering perfection. It dismays us because it is the opposite of febrile, unknowable, unpredictable life. People like the Starship robots because they need human help. They’re small and modest. They’re not looming over us, or doing backflips, or generally showing off. Instead, they seem to be doing their best, trundling onward. Slightly underrated — like Milton Keynes.

“Things might get bad for the robots,” Ole says. “if the economy gets any worse. If there’s even more unemployment. If our politicians use robots for the purposes of surveillance and control. Even the friendly robots might find things are pretty rough.”

Perhaps one day there will be humanoids running along the boulevards of Milton Keynes, scaring us witless as they hand over our groceries. Perhaps there will be frantic quadrupeds, or soaring flocks of drones. Perhaps there will be robot-on-robot apocalypses, one generation of robot wiped out by another. Robots will come for our jobs but then robots then come for those robots’ jobs.

Perhaps we will see lots of unemployed little robots, rolling around Milton Keynes and other places. Or perhaps humans will defend the little robo-boxes, preferring them to creepier alternatives. They’ll smash up the new robots to save the old. After that, in some remote future there will be robot fossil records. Alongside the relics of the Bell Beaker folk in a futuristic version of the Milton Keynes Museum, there will be the Starship Robot folk and a cracked recording of a faded robot voice, singing “Happy Birthday.”