Drones are a visual nuisance and produce noise. Do you want to disturb bus riders and residential areas.
The Silicon Valley episode where a Stanford lab produced a robotic deer that is completely useless but caused a road accident is reality.
I hope people will react like Erlich Bachman when these drones become a thing.
It's too early to make the prediction with certainty, but I won't be at all surprised if 20 years from now "autonomous delivery drone" is right up there with flying cars and nuclear fusion on the "20 more years" shelf.
If the standard is that new inventions must be invisible and inaudible, I don't see a lot of innovation in the future.
But I don't think my housing situation is that relevant for the issue.
I'm not smart enough to know what makes me "reductionist".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise
(scnr)
There are a lot of existing laws about aircraft noise that cars, trucks and scooters don't need to worry about. And once you reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings your "airport" falls under additional regulations that require things like permanent noise monitoring and paying money for noise abatement for nearby property owners.
In my state, any citizen can file a public nuisance suit for unreasonable noise that interferes with quality of life. With trucks, cars and scooters it is perhaps a little difficult to track and attribute noise sources. One company making thousands of drone deliveries makes for a very easy target.
* California limits exhaust noise to 95 dBa: http://www.californiacarlaws.com/exhaust-noise/
* Colorado has a subjective standard "prevent any excessive or unusual noise" https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2016/title-42/regulati...
* Connecticut has a pretty complicated scheme depending on the vehicle's weight and age, as well as the road surface: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R-0205.htm
* Delaware has a subjective standard: "muffler in good working order and in accordance with manufacturer's specifications and in constant operation to prevent excessive or unusual noise." https://law.justia.com/codes/delaware/2015/title-21/chapter-...
There are, of course, laws about other sources of noise too. Ask any college kid.
The level of enforcement for this has to be something like zero....
As for cars and trucks, the noise they produce is regulated in about half of the US: https://www.semasan.com/resources/exhaust-noise-laws-state
2. I didn't say there would be micro-farms and micro-ranches. I don't believe in "village-level" autarchy. But in my view there should be much less ferrying of food from halfway across the world because people work there for a couple of USD per day and ship fuel is (still) cheap.
3. My point was that it's a huge waste of social resources, not to mention fuel, to send out vehicles across town to deliver food. It's also part of a process of social atomization where more and more of our interactions are mediated and modulated by impersonal commercial processes.
Again, I'm speechless at the level of indoctrination. It is for my own good!
I'll be working on my next business idea. A shower head with an invisible camera that streams to the manufacturer for the protection of the shower user. After all, he might slip and the device could call an ambulance.
The shower head could monitor if the user is overweight and send some weight-loss ads. It is for the user's own good!
Also, I'll make it opt-out, and the opt-out process will be in a shrink wrap license.
It is all for our own good!
IoT devices are often evil, and I would no longer be surprised if anyone took the above business "idea" as a manual and went ahead with it.
It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, and those were better times in that respect (and many others).
I do not understand this point.
Every technology goes through a period of societal decision whether to tolerate the downsides (even very broadly distributed, vague downsides) compared to the benefits created.
Some techs suck because they just need refinement/people aren't used to them, and some are just bad ideas. It's hard to tell in advance so people bet on all sorts of things.