What if sidewalk delivery robots scale up and displace gig couriers?
Mass sidewalk-robot approval pressures gig-courier labor models (DoorDash, Uber) and feeds a modest edge-compute bid, but city-by-city permitting caps the rollout speed. Rhymes with Starship/Serve Robotics campus pilots (2022-24) — incremental, not a step-change in last-mile economics. Mixed by design: the cleaner trade is margin relief at the platforms, not the Nvidia +1.0% leg, which a sidewalk fleet cannot justify.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Cities approve mass sidewalk-robot deployment, displacing gig couriers and pressuring DoorDash and Uber labor models. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Robotics productivity ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.