Not Creepy At All: Amazon’s Going To Be Sending Drones To Your House Now

Apparently Amazon is planning on switching over to drone delivery for delivery of items within 30 minutes...cause paying people sucks.

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So this is the first I’m seeing this because I don’t watch 60 Minutes but apparently Amazon is planning on switching over to drone delivery for delivery of items within 30 minutes and is calling it “Prime Air.” It’s interesting to me for a couple of reasons but first here’s the video that Amazon has released of what a typical 30 minute delivery process would be like.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/98BIu9dpwHU]

Okay, fine, but what does this mean? I can anticipate about 30 possible problems with this that a human being based delivery system wouldn’t have but here’s just a few.

  • Weather, yeah, it’s obvious. Good luck in storms or highish winds.
  • Lost Link, this is where the drone loses it’s link to the GPS satellite feed and goes off course. You have to have a robust redundancy system in place to make sure that the drone doesn’t just shut off and fall out of the sky. Until you get it right, packages and drones will get lost which means they’ll fall on people and things.
  • Gets rid of terrible “jobs that humans do” which continues to plague our society if only barely. While others might welcome this streamlining of the delivery process, I don’t. If I need something in 30 minutes I leave the house and go get it. If I don’t need it in 30 minutes then who cares?
  • How long until the government starts using undercover Amazon drones to conduct surveillance? I’m not even kidding here and I’m not being paranoid. It would be a great idea for gathering imagery.

This won’t even happen for a few years since the FAA is still crafting guidelines for civilian drones but it’s definitely coming. Amazon is notorious for paying *meh* wages and benefits in its warehouses while working their employees like mules and obviously would prefer the whole system run itself so I suppose we’ll see how far corporations are willing to take this. As it is, this seems like a solution looking for a problem unless a problem is paying people to do things.

Yeah, apparently UPS is looking to do the same thing. Thought Catalog Logo Mark