Uber Ambitiously Eyes 2021 for Food-Delivery Drones | Hacker News Reader

Uber Ambitiously Eyes 2021 for Food-Delivery Drones

wsj.com

27 pointslxm43 comments

The idea of a world where beehive-esque drone noise is ubiquitous is terrifying to me. That sounds like a truly awful future.

It's going to be real shitty to be outside once there are hundreds of drones flying around all over the damn place. Road noise is bad enough.

Yeah I do agree. Road noise is really bad and leafblowers are even worse.

If there are hundreds of leafblowers buzzing around outside my house, I'm going to be really really angry because I signed a social contract that basically says I can't do anything crazy, but suddenly big corps can?

A sudden strike from the wind and they will cut your throat or cut out your eyes. Imagine the paranoia walking on the street.

I get where you are coming from, but this is an non-factor.

Drones can be built to be very safe with jet-engine like enclosures. Also, Their power will mostly likely be nowhere enough to cause significant damage to a human.

A heavy object falling on a head and causing real damage.... now that's a more likely event.

__________

If drones are sufficiently regulated :

1. Can't fly over private property, regions with many kids. 2. Prefer to be flown above roads 3. Drone owner liable for damages

Then I can see them being a great replacement humans in food delivery.

I don't think they will be louder than a car or a motor-bike any way.

> 1. Can't fly over private property, regions with many kids.

Most private property has much lower persons/square meter then public property.

If a drone falling out of the sky is a factor, I'd much rather see it happen into a back yard, or onto a rooftop, as opposed to a city street.

If drones raining down on public property is an issue I would certainly hope that shifting that and other costs to private property is not considered remotely acceptable.

I'd imagine that whether these drones make it to market or not depends on whether Uber/Amazon can create drones that fly quietly.

That said, road noise is already a thing. I'm not a big fan of road noise either, but cars are helpful enough that we keep them around. Maybe it'll turn out that the same is true for drones.

That's what noise regulations are for.

This is a horrible idea.

I can imagine some compelling reasons for using drones as an automated delivery mechanism, but this - food delivery, isn't one of them. On the contrary, I think they are particularly bad for food delivery.

However, I do harbor a sense of amazement at how competition drives businesses. For Uber to invest in this seemingly stupid idea and openly declare such goals hints at how clearly they realize the importance of keeping on moving over stagnating.

Uber being uber has no soft corner in my mind, but I do like seeing things move forward.

It could go poorly, but delivery drones are inevitable at this point. We just need to focus on innovating ways to reduce noise, and flying them at altitudes where most people won't hear them, as well as flying paths that avoid private property and optimize for the least populated areas.

Food delivered via drone sounds amazing to me. Maybe not to other people, but I'd like to see this done well and without creating too many externalities.

> flying them at altitudes where most people won't hear them

if they're going to do this, they're going to need some serious insulation to keep the food warm.

If it's as obnoxious as you imagine, everyone will bitch and it will get banned. Look at all of the noise over powered scooters being inconveniently placed. That was a much more minor annoyance and whole cities couldn't stop talking about it.

Is there anything keeping a drone from being silent? (Obviously they're quite loud today.)

Ambitiously solving such a hard problem: the convenience of having food brought up to your house. Hot dang! Next up, the drone will drop the food right into your mouth. Premium customers will have the drone chew the food on its way to your house.

I wonder how far we will go in the interest of convenience. There are such hard and pressing problems right now in the world and a company wasting money trying to fill the sky with buzzing drones delivering food to fat lazy assholes is being labeled as ambitious. Is this the near future we want? Do we really _need_ a beehive of buzzing drones because we're so busy we can't just go out and fucking buy food?

Give me a break...

"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

- Socrates on writing/reading

The existence of hard and pressing problems does not mean all resources should be diverted to them - capitalism.

I feel you're exaggerating a bit much, though I get what you're trying to say.

re-reading my post and I agree with you, I think I'm exaggerating. Perhaps I'm having a depressing “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” moment. I feel like all this money and energy is being thrown at crap that will eventually work against our best interests as a society.

To put this in context [1], Socrates is repeating a story about an Egyptian king responding to an Egyptian god who invented writing. Socrates does mostly agree with the king. I disagree with Socrates that wise teachers would only put their thoughts down in writing for amusement, but his general point is that you can't ask books questions and they can't defend themselves, and that they aren't the best way of transferring knowledge from person to person. If you ever read a book critically, or if you appreciate a lecture or a live teacher to understand material instead of a textbook, you agree with him in ways. Also, the entire world has had oral traditions outside of writing for the millennia since Socrates that have only been recently stamped down by radio and TV.

[1] http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.h...

edit: There was more time between the invention of Egyptian writing (which the Greek alphabet was ultimately derived from) and Socrates than between the death of Socrates and today, so it's not like he didn't understand the use of writing, or thought it was some new-fangled thing.

Time not spent going out and buying food is more time I can spend with my friends, family and hobbies. If you spend 30 minutes per day on logistics of going out, buying, traveling, and coming back, then that's a full week per year.

I have a breakthrough idea. Hold on, because it's especially disruptive. You can go out and get food... with your friends and family. Also, one very lucrative hobby is cooking. And seriously, that's not the market for shit like food delivery drones. Let's not beat around the bush, this will be mostly used by people who get high and play league of legends.

Anyway you put it, the time savings does not provide a good ROI for the rest of the crap which follows a company like Uber flying a fleet of buzzing drones in an urban environment.

> Anyway you put it, the time savings does not provide a good ROI for the rest of the crap which follows a company like Uber flying a fleet of buzzing drones in an urban environment.

compared to a fleet of '95 civics in questionable repair roaming the streets all day, a bunch of small drones doesn't actually sound that bad. drones aren't actually that loud once they're ~100 ft in the air and DJI is making them quieter every year.

The real innovation here isn’t more time for family and friends (perhaps more time for scrolling social media?) but rather to eliminate a layer of the economy often filled by immigrants and people of color.

The real convince is to not need interact with people who aren’t of your social class.

Hopefully the FAA holds Uber to a higher standard than the Arizona DOT did.

Uber's history and culture of skirting regulation is concerning when it comes to aviation.

Uber pulls the drone announcement con, yet again, for free coverage in th WSJ. Nobody is delivering anything by drone anytime soon. WSJ were conned by it, were you?

A more interesting questions is: What is your estimate of how much this is worth in uber advertising?

Trying to be first at a game no one wants to play.

Uber want to play it. That's what the entire article is about. Amazon also want to play it - they've done several public demos of the concept.

Uber wants to play at anything that will make them profitable and give them an exit.

Yes - this is clearly a bad idea that fails the common sense test. But it will add more assets, higher value, etc.

And another reason they may get bought

Alphabet are also demonstrating aerial deployment of burritos https://www.gearbrain.com/google-alphabet-burrito-drone-deli...

Curious. What will the details look like? Is this for countryside or houses with yard, or condos also?

I really wonder how the full delivery scenario is envisioned. Where do the Drone deliver the package? In front of my home? Do I have to go climb on top of roof? Does it call me or send me and SMS once it's there or do I need to stand outside?

One of the challenges here would seem to be that the places where this could most obviously work (where you have standalone houses with space around them) simultaneously tend to have a lot fewer takeout delivery options today. Maybe this hypothetical delivery service would increase the delivery range but it's not obvious why it would.

Conversely, this would be very challenging in a city and there are tons of cheap delivery options already.

At this point it seems like Uber's strategy is the following:

1. Gather a bunch of PMs 2. Put them all in a room and have them put wacky ideas into a large hat 3. Pull ideas out of the hat, and go with the first one that sounds decent

This is basically every large company that overhires PMs

Why do delivery drones need to fly? Why can't we have small, autonomous, road-based delivery drones?

Because as complicated as flight is, it's much easier for a computer to handle than navigating roads around cars and pedestrians.

Will be fun to see the inevitable YouTube videos of these as clay pigeons.

...followed by various arrests for self-documented destruction of property.

Probably more likely to be charged with unlawful discharge than property destruction, especially if their property crosses my property without my explicit consent. Though by then there will likely be FAA protections in place.

"Your property" ends at 500 feet up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights#United_States

There's a lot of ambiguity about air rights and it's never been precisely defined by either the legislature or the judiciary. It wasn't a big deal before drones (outside of a real estate context). And under current FAA rules drones typically have to stay under 400 ft.

It will be "interesting" to see this plays out. It seems obvious that regulations won't allow routine and widespread drone delivery flights to fly a few hundred feet over personal property--given that I suspect a lot of people would be really unhappy about this.

I think people in general are freaked out about drones; there's been too many stories of hovering drones with cameras while children play in the pool. FUD or not, it's a concern.

Providing the solution to a problem that doesn't exist

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate...”

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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