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Comment by a4isms | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect that Amazon are nearly continuously planning for automated deliveries. Drones? Trucks with lockers that stop in front of your house and you retrieve your delivery?

I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."

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Do you think robotics on the street are going to last long at scale? How’s it going for Flock ALPR cameras? Is Bezos going to be out in the streets defending automated vehicles, drones, and last mile robots on foot? Unlikely.

I don’t think that comparison works. People aren’t attacking Flock cameras because they’re taking work away from hard working video camera watchers. It’s because they’re spying on them. By comparison autonomous delivery vehicles aren’t doing anything the manned vehicles don’t do today.

https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/4...

> As part of a June 2024 survey, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA) polled 1,031 U.S. adults ages 18 or older to identify attitudes toward drone delivery services, which may soon be much more common due to changes in the regulations governing them. Our polling reveals that Americans are deeply concerned about the possibility of neighborhood disturbances, privacy violations, and abuses of power by the large corporations poised to dominate drone delivery, including Amazon, Google, and Walmart. Moreover, we find overwhelming bipartisan support for the regulation of drone delivery services. When Americans learn about policy options to curtail the drawbacks of drone delivery, they respond positively to the government taking action.

I think the comparison works.

Aerial drone delivery services creating a fleet of flying lawnmower noises over my house is entirely a different thing than quiet electric based ground delivery vehicles... At least theoretical ground based delivery vehicles without humans aren't dumping gatorade piss bottles.

The business conditions that necessitate the use of piss bottles themselves are a pretty good indicator of how poor the working conditions are for many 3rd party contracted delivery services.

To drive itself around safely, any ground vehicle will need some kind of awareness of those surroundings. Right now, that means cameras. I don't think people will be satisfied if those cameras get replaced with short wavelength radar given that WiFi-band radio goes through walls and would therefore allow spying inside houses and there's already people messing around with this as YouTube tech demos.

Similar applies to basically all sense equipment: if it is good enough for safe driving, it's good enough to be a surveillance node.

And given that "oh no my data was leaked" is a big enough problem even with just websites, that there are whole businesses dedicated to just helping with it, anyone who starts with "Your Privacy Is Important To Us" is automatically facing a massive trust deficit.

I think that's a legit question, but the way it plays out is not clear.

See the luddite movement in the UK: the way the machines were getting used threatened livelihoods, protestors (who were even fine using the machines in principle) damaged or destroyed them, government wrote new law allowing the death penalty for "machine breaking".

On the other hand, the UK in the 1810s is not something that people today would call "democratic", so perhaps popular vitriol might today may instead result in politicians getting elected to make the automation cease.

I think the long term plan is for the automated vehicles and last mile robots to defend themselves. We're already living in some form of a post-modern cyberpunk dystopia, it just isn't full distributed yet.

I'm not sure I understand the comparison. There's over 100k Flock ALPR cameras in the country, despite how many people passionately despise them and are willing to risk criminal charges to destroy them. Amazon is a much more popular business and delivery robots pose fewer privacy concerns, so I would expect street robots to face even fewer deployment problems if the tech becomes cost-competitive.

Flying drones I can see more potential problems with.

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