Amazon's Drone-Delivery Dreams Are No Joke (backchannel.com)

Backchannel's Steven Levy reports that Amazon "has a site at an undisclosed semi-rural location where it attempts to simulate the possible obstacles that drones will face in real-world deliveries." Amazon's drones reach speeds of 60 miles per hour, and can perform a 20-mile round trip, which makes Amazon believe they could especially useful deliveries to the suburbs, some rural areas. "The facility features a faux backyard and other simulated locations where drones might have to drop off their cargo." An anonymous reader quotes their report: "For a while, we were missing clotheslines," says Paul Viola, an AI expert who is charge of Prime Air's autonomy efforts. Now, Amazon's vehicles have a "Don't Hit Clotheslines!" rule in their code. There's even a simulated dog (though not a robot) that Amazon uses to see how the vehicles will respond to canine threats... Amazon is also planning for urban deliveries, with the idea of landing drones on rooftops [and] eventually it might expand to multiple deliveries per expedition, or even take returns back to the warehouse...

All of this is done without human intervention. Drones know where to go and how to get there without a human sitting at a ground station actually flying the plane... [A]n Air Prime technician can order a drone to land, but ultimately the drones are autonomous. Amazon envisions that eventually it will have sort of an air traffic controller monitoring the flight patterns of multiple drones.
If something goes wrong, "the first rule of Amazon drones is to abort the flight, returning to base or even carefully finding a landing spot from which to send a rescue signal. 'If it doesn't seem safe, it will land as soon as safely possible,' says Gur Kimchi, who has headed the Prime Air team for four years. (He previously worked at Microsoft.)"

Comments

Rural deliveries; from base trucks

[sonamchauhan]

Drones executing rural deliveries, launched from some sort of 'base truck' a human drives to a central location to launch and monitor multiple drones. That's pretty much the only use case for drone delivery.

Of course, a fully functional delivery system is symmetrical -- you can send stuff _back_ using the same channel. The base truck should also accept the farmer's *own* drone returning a non-functional item to Amazon.

And I'm not laughing

[golodh]

Solving the technicalities to get pinpoint parcel delivery by drone right is something I'd enjoy doing. A fun problem with potential relevance for society.

What I'm worried about however is safety and security surrounding drone delivery. Buying a drone off the shelf still won't allow you to easily deliver parcels to a location outside your line of sight 5 miles away. But Amazon is solving that problem right now. Great huh?

Only ... I can't be the only one who's thought about the possibilities of hijacking or impersonating Amazon drones for delivery of two pounds of semtex plus plus detonator wired to a phone or a timer to homes of e.g. e.g. veterans or politicians. Or military bases. Or shopping malls. Or schools. Or congress.

Detonating a pound or two of semtex on a docked submarine (worth a cool billion) wouldn't be a bad payoff for your average terrorist either.

What (if anything) is being done to prevent e.g. Al Qaida or ISIS (or whatever you've got) from abusing this system? Has anyone thought about this at all? Is anyone going to do so before the system goes live?

In a pinch you might equip military bases with an anti-drone system. But people's homes? And schools, malls, cinema's ? Worth considering before it all goes live perhaps?

Re:Amazon envisions...

[ScentCone]

Previous "revolutions" have ended up creating jobs, But unlike this one, their purpose was not to destroy jobs.

Yes, things like farm machinery and freight trains absolutely were intended to destroy jobs. Likewise laundry machines. And don't forget all of the file clerks, paper industry employees, and sheet metal workers at file cabinet manufacturers out of work because of computer systems. Such things have been destroying jobs for many decades, even centuries, now.

The solution is: enough prosperity to bring about what it always does ... fewer babies being had.

Actually, we can still have full employment

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Humanity doesn't really have to support people who never contribute. (Most people will retire or whatever, and some will never be fit to work).

1) Shrink the work week. (I consider this nonviable because it is wasteful)
We can shrink the "work week" to almost nothing. Then everyone needs to "work" at those few jobs which are still essential. You just divide up the work smaller and smaller. I think this is a stupid idea, because the overhead on learning the skills tends to infinity.

2) Employ everyone in jobs that can't be automated. This means people working in arts, and maybe the sciences (if that remains unautomated), eradicating the last of the diseases that still afflict humanity, etc. This means that the people who control resources will have to demand *far far* more arts and science than they currently do. Yet in an abundance society, there will be effectively more resources to demand creative output from people than there are people. Seems like no problem, it just takes willingness to put resources to use this way. This way, we can keep "work or die", but there *has* to be a commitment from those who control resources to *accept* whatever creative work can be done by the people that are alive. This is by far my preferred vision of human future, thanks Marshall Brain for the inspiration. It preserves motivation to continue creative work instead of allowing humanity to descend to total meaningless existence.

3) Provide handouts with no expectation of work. This *may* work out well, I don't think it's a proven fact that people won't do creative things without threat of starvation. I think some will be driven to create despite having all necessities handed to them.

Good outcome or bad depends only and solely on the greed of those who control resources. If they want to hog all the resources to themselves, far beyond their needs, then yes, it'll be a mass slaughter. If they want to allow humanity as a whole to use the available resources is some more equitable way, then it could end up as a paradise.

--PeterM

First Commercial Drone Delivery Service

[cusco]

These guys at Zipline deliver emergency medical supplies to remote clinics in Rwanda. Not sunscreen to suburbanites. Anywhere within 120 kilometers of the base can receive a delivery of blood, vaccines, or other medical supplies within an hour of sending a text message, a trip that can take most of a day by road (if the road is even passable at that moment).

The trip is fully automated, just input the coordinates of the destination and the package is on its way at 100 kph. This is not a demonstration or beta project, they're currently in full operation in Rwanda and testing in other countries. The day they start to set up shop in Peru I'm retiring and going to work for them.