Very much not excited or looking forward to drone and aerial vehicle/taxi/Uber visual and noise pollution.
This isn't progress, this is selling out our well-being and environment so that a few people can get rich.
This isn't progress, this is selling out our well-being and environment so that a few people can get rich.
But the delivery drones are just one aspect. We're also going to get these flying taxis and those are going to suck too. Why invest or pay to maintain roads or highways or to build and improve sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, or rail lines when you can just take your air taxi directly to your landing spot and make sure to avoid contact with any humans along the way.
A good lens that you can use to examine this technology is whether the drones and air taxis are additive or subtractive. Good technology tends to be subtractive, i.e. an iPhone replaced a lot of unnecessary things (of course it had some downsides). Sidewalks and bike lanes are another good example of subtractive technology.
Additive technology would be something like a heated seat subscription, or these air taxis and drones. We're not really improving anything we're doing today, we're just adding to it. It's like feature creep.
I'd also argue that more environmentally friendly, faster, potentially less expensive delivers are an improvement on what people are doing today.
Air taxis are very different from a regulatory perspective (greater safety requirements) and from an engineering perspective (much heavier payloads). I don't really see this authorization as evidence that they will be approved in the future.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I anticipate that they will have an effect, and that effect may be reduced usage, but I don't envision any reason they will totally replace delivery drivers. More likely, they'll complement delivery drivers.
> I'd also argue that more environmentally friendly, faster, potentially less expensive delivers are an improvement on what people are doing today.
Faster deliveries already happened. Even faster deliveries for the routine stuff that you buy seems like a needless feature. I know I don't need a set of wine glasses the same day or same hour, and if I did then I'll just plan better or deal with it. Especially if the trade off for me enjoying my back patio or something involves watching humming drones wizzing buy all day so someone can get some cheap plastic stuff delivered to them an hour faster...
How do we get something faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly anyway? There's a trade-off somewhere. Maybe it's worth it, though I doubt it. It's hard to buy the environmental angle here when you could instead just reduce consumption. It seems more like greenwashing. Once you take away the environmental angle, you can see (or at least I do) how absurd the whole proposal of "drone delivery" really is.
There could be some other, fantastic innovations though that really are subtractive instead of additive. Generally speaking if we aren't eliminating the usage of 1 or more things though we should be skeptical of the technology.
Then I imagine the amount of drone’s required to replicate even a portion of these Amazon deliveries and it starts to make my head spin.
I can imagine some use cases for the drone deliveries but there is no way I can imagine it replacing much of the current delivery system.
Being noisy and annoying is just the very tip of the development iceberg here.
Can a delivery driver do some of this stuff today and so why haven't they done it yet? Sure. And idk, it'll just take time. The UAV platform is going to be a lot better for this kind of nuisance.
If lawn-care companies wanted to do targeted advertising based on how your lawn is looking, they can already use satellite imagery for that. They don't need drone cameras.
These drones also aren't going to fly by your window. They fly above the height of houses, trees, etc. - and they are too small ads you could see from that height
Companies have also had, for like a decade now, advertisements in places like malls with cameras to track engagement and how often people look at it and what number of people look at it.
Amazon Fresh also started sending me flyers in the mail after I visited a single time. I get them multiple times a week.
Delivery drones (which is part of the topic at hand) will absolutely fly by my window, otherwise how will they deliver the packages? Flying above my house still means I see the drones from my window.
Ads? Just beam images down or in the sky. Airplanes do this now during big sporting events and such. Buy a car! So and so are getting married! Etc.
Oh I can see it now. Coordinated drone ads where they'll fly over the sky and let me know it's Black Friday Only at Wal-Mart or I can get the best deal on a new Samsung OLED Smart TV now by scanning the drone QR code with my mobile phone!