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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.
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.
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