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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.)"
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.)"
...just like autonomous cars. They aren't a joke. They are really just around the corner. They are just working out some final technical details. Really. We promise.
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.
Like any business, Amazon's envisions becoming as profitable as possible which means they aim for 100% automation because automation doesn't need to be paid. Capitalism itself is really just an optimization problem where you extract as much money from people while giving the least amount of it back. However, like humanity working to exhaust a natural resource, businesses will too hit a point where they find themselves in trouble because of the lack of balance they have created in the economic ecosystem. Those with authority are either ignorant of this fact or simply don't care. Automation can either be our liberator or our destructor and it's up to us to decide that while we still can.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They just need one of these puppies and a faraday cage to put it in when it lands. No way for the drone to send back video or any information on the attacker and it can be transported to a radio secure location to open and disable it.
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?
Nobody addresses the fact that these things will make a lot of noise in settled areas. And as the drone traffic increases, so will the noise level, to the point that in some communities there may be incessant drone delivery noise.
E Proelio Veritas.
I wonder if they remembered overhead phone, and cable service lines, and assuming they did, why this software didn't recognize clothes lines as an obstacle.
It seems unlikely researchers will be able to anticipate every obstacle an unmanned delivery vehicle would encounter in a simulated model.
Ultimately, it will come down to an equation: additional loss of packages and UAVs + UAV cost and maintenance is less than or equal to conventional human delivery services.
I wonder if they remembered overhead phone, and cable service lines, and assuming they did, why this software didn't recognize clothes lines as an obstacle.
It seems unlikely researchers will be able to anticipate every obstacle an unmanned delivery vehicle would encounter in a simulated model.
I'd love to see them try to deliver in my neighborhood. A wooded area, where the only open spaces are where the roads are, and even then, trees in the canopy and wires. and a lot of birds, some of the bigger ones don't like drones either. The only open space where a drone can fly is about along the roadways and sidewalks. Which are all designed to not be on a roadway grid. The airspace doesn't clear up until about 40 meters off the ground. And many of the affluent neighborhoods in my area are using this model.
And Amazon is going to get a hellava bill if one of their drones tears down any of my wire antennas. They're designed to be unobtrusive. My own drone can't see them. But a drone coming in contact with one of them won't be in the air much longer.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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
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.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Jeff Bezos is not as bad as Donald Trump, but Bezos says and does things that show he isn't thinking carefully.
Remote control over drones can ALWAYS be eliminated or hijacked by radio frequency interference.
Technology ALWAYS has failures, like those at Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi, and Chernobyl.
Amazon drone delivery: nine ways it could go horribly wrong
I don't want drones near where I live. Will drones be allowed near where Jeff Bezos lives?
...and it'll result in downed drones and birds.
Just look at Apple. They're the most profitable company on Earth and they did it with prices 2-3x market.
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Good point about the loss of communication. But there are MANY problems:
1) What if communication is hijacked?
2) There are many, many dogs that would jump on a drone trying to land a package.
3) There are children would try to capture a drone. Mom! I found a plane in our yard!
4) A drone would be REALLY, REALLY ANNOYING to a lot of people. Why? A drone would compromise their safety. A drone would emit scary noise. Many, many people in the U.S., a nation of gun owners, would shoot at a drone. Even children might use their BB guns to shoot at a drone.
5) Thieves might like to capture a drone.
6) Weather is often ENTIRELY UNPREDICTABLE. A big, unexpected gust of wind could smash a drone against a house. There are many places where 2 weather systems come together in which weather reports are only educated guesses.
7) Electronics sometimes fails. (Funny: I can imagine Slashdot readers saying, "What! I didn't know that!")
8) Mechanical devices sometimes fail.
9) There are often design errors that are only discovered after device failure.
These are problems of TRUMPIC proportions!
But yes, Jeff Bezos is still better than Donald Trump.
I'd love to see them try to bring these new-fangled automobiles to my neighborhood! A wooded area with no open spaces and a lot of birds.
There is a reason we don't share roads and flying machines. In my neighborhood, the drone would have to either hva to follow the road at car height, in which case, the delivery should be by autonomous vehicle not a flying machine.
My point is, that despite your trying to turn this into a get off my lawn statement, drones are simply not a good choice for delivery method in many places. I suppose in a development that was at one time a farmer's field, with no trees, underground services, and a non-reactionary populous, a drone could work pretty well. Otherwise it is a solution that causes more problems than it cures.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.