I agree, this is 100% P.R. bullshit. There are far too many regulatory problems, and insurance for the service would be prohibitive. Add to that delivery screw-ups, crashes, glitches, injuries from all previously mentioned, and people waiting with baseball bats or whatever ready to bash flying guillotines, and I am convinced I will never see this in my lifetime. It is absolutely P.R. distraction, probably to deflect from Amazon’s horrible warehouse employee policies and to pump holiday sales.
“But someone will lose their job” has stopped technology exactly zero times in the long run. You are far better off figuring out what to do about the job that will be lost, than to waste time trying to keep the technology back. If drones don’t steal those jobs, autonomous trucks would have a year or two later.
Technology destroying jobs is a good thing. It means that we are spending fewer resources to do the same thing. Fewer resources spent to do a job means scarce resources can be spent elsewhere on something else. Technology destroying jobs only sucks when you have a dysfunctional political and economic system that can’t retrain or take care of people who find their labor rendered useless. We are vastly more likely to be able to fix the political problem of lost jobs than to stop the technology. Granted, fixing the political side of lost jobs is no easy task, but it is doable. Stopping technology on the other hand is both destructive and a utterly lost cause.
“But terrorism” is literally the stupidest argument in existence to not do anything. If someone can get ahold of and load a few thousand drones with a few thousands pounds of explosives without anyone catching on, you have bigger problems. They could after all just put that few thousand pounds of explosives into one van, drive it into a tunnel or onto a bridge, and blow it up doing real damage to the cities infrastructure, rather than just being annoying and scorching my porch and giving police a chance to put their target practice to work. That wasn’t an argument against tunnels or bridges either.
Americans faced down nuclear oblivion and a massive technological industrial empire that spanned half the world and had influence or direct control over a few billion people, and somehow managed to keep from losing their cool. Now mention “terrorist”, people who kill fewer people than fucking bathtubs, have no technology, a handful of fighters, and have to use operatives are literally retarded, and Americans shit themselves and run screaming tossing their paltry liberties in the trash. This is the most worthless generation of Americans ever. Previous generations of Americans might have been nastier, more sexist, and racists, but god damn it they were not a few orders of magnitude less the cowards.
Well, yes, of course. You are much more likely to be killed by the police than by a terrorist. I’m not saying its a valid reason not to implement delivery drones (other much more valid reasons exist, like the annoying sound those multi copters make. It’s really very annoying.)
As unlikely as such an attack would be, the mere possibility of such a scenario will probably argue, in the public arena, against allowing them. Also, the scenario you envision of thousands of drones paradoxically scorching porches is a bit of a straw man. I bet you could think up viable and truly damaging scenarios involving only one or a few of the little whining whirlybirds. Not at all likely scenarios, for sure. But possible, and difficult to enforce against, and difficult to investigate as well.
I would assume that in a mature implementation, that would be replaced with a standard amazon box, possibly coated in some manner for water resistance. Although you’d probably also have a landing pad/waterproof secure box that the drone drops the package off into, so waterprofing the box might not be needed.
This would be the perfect way to have your endangered species burgers delivered directly to your fiancee’s weekend place in Paris. Nothing like a last minute change of plans to raise the romantic distraction to a new level…
