Amazon Can Now Test Its Delivery Drones in the U.S

I believe an ultimate goal should be to reach the point where people don't need jobs.

I feel this is somewhat misguided, even a modern version of a pneumatic mail tube system would make more sense to me.

There many other much better use cases for drones and Quadcopters in other industries. I'd expect self-driving cars to have more impact on delivery.

This is happening as we speak. The next 30 years will be absolutely nuts.

That's why some form of socialism will become inevitable. We will absolutely have to provide millions of people with food, shelter and basic medicine. Or face famine and revolts.

Unless we want serious societal unrest, I am convinced that we need to get something like basic income off the ground sooner rather than later.

The worst case scenario on the other hand is pretty dystopian.

I for one, welcome our new overlords.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Average-Is-Over-Powering-Stagnation-eb...

Delightfully, robot comes from a Czech word originating in "hard work, servitude, serfdom". Basically a slave. Any business looking to drive down costs push their human components as close to slavery as is allowable by law or acceptable to the workers.

So when people fight to preserve human jobs in say, fast food, agriculture, or factories, in general you see them preserved by humans opting to work for less or in worse conditions. Cheap human labor actually starts to limit technological progress at this point.

So, where's that leave the future? Hopefully we can move to a post-employment world, where people don't need masses of near-robot human resources to make profits. I don't know what the world looks like, but to me it's better than a world where humans compete with each other to be better robots for their bosses.

At the very least, it punishes people with a "fixed" world view.

FAR 91.119 in part says: "no person may operate an aircraft below...an altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface."

There are numerous regulations that should apply to drones, just as there are ones that shouldn't, and ones yet to be written unique to drones. But has Amazon provided any input on the existing regulatory paradigm? I haven't heard anything but whining.

I don't see how, or why, an autonomous aircraft should be exempt from the regulation cited above. It's the same thing we expect of other aircraft. We're talking about ~50lb (plus or minus, what, 40lb?), at up to 400' above the ground, at up to 100mph. As a pilot of both single and multi-engine airplanes, I'm very appropriately expected to be at an altitude and location that in the event of a power plant failure I can prevent on-ground injuries. We can't just let companies throw up their hands and say "yeah, it's a problem we're working on, but we must not have deliveries impeded in the meantime!"