Shenzhen is huge and has an absurd amount of tech companies, so this doesn't really surprise me.

China's government is handing out massive subsidies for everything called robotics. This causes the number of companies that claim to do robotics to be inflated

the city is in key national focus for prototyping modernization and creating a smart city.

industries tend to be more centralized in China. It's not that that's indicative of every city, more that Shenzhen already has easy access to the kind of manufacturing and products that a robotics company would find ideal.

It must be easy to start a business there

Yeah. Just need to make sure that sensible restrictions are in place to prevent the creep into turning a public service into primarily a commercial one. Starts out only running during off hours, then running during active hours at a reduced rate, then it's got dedicated cars for the robots, then it overflows into passenger cars... you see where it's going. Best to set up guard rails before it's a problem.

Good point. If trains are empty might as well use them.

Estonia's delivery bots were a game changer - they reduced last-mile delivery costs by almost 40% in urban areas and had surprisingly good weather adaptibility, even in snow (though they did get stuck somtimes lol).

No it's "disruption", just offload all your delivery costs onto public mass transit infrastructure and fill up the subway cars with deliveries instead of people. Profit.

Meh, I think I like the idea of 1 truck pulling up to a docking bay, them all driving out the back and hopping on the mostly empty cars in slow times that are already going to the subway platforms where the deliveries need to go. It's either that or having to go through every subway entry point to drop them off. I think this will get flack because people are anti automation, but if it was people pushing carts to restock them manually I would still prefer them all getting in one vehicle to the subway and all getting on there and hopping off 1 at each stop. The product is all coming from one source, so why have 43 routes from place to sub station and then 43 routes back. If it is actually busy enough that it is holding up entry somewhere, having it in one location and streamlining it sounds nicer as well. It's not like the people can bring carts through turnstyles anyways, so they are already entering through a designated entry if the 7-11's are on the platforms. (They might not be, they could be elsewhere, but the article says downstairs).

Those Starship drones are cute as hell

I think all jobs that are able to be replaced by robots should be replaced, the dystopian factor is how capitalism deprives people of the ability to exist in doing so.

I'd call every society where the concept of a job still exists a dystopia.

We have the tools to start moving past that, question is how can you bridge the period in between.