As a consumer I couldn't be happier about getting things delivered faster and higher quality experiences with sub 1 hour delivery. Across the board technology companies are replacing humans and consolidating services.
My concern comes when I think about the accelerating rate that technology is replacing human jobs faster than humans can re-educate themselves to get new jobs. Education here is the missing link and if you look at our public education system it sucks, is leaving many poor and underserved people behind and creating a two class system.
I look forward to reading the pros and cons of technology replacing jobs with the understanding that HN is a pro technology community.
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.
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.
they will get jobs servicing each other as doctors, teachers, nurses, lawyers, soldiers, playwriters, government clerks/officers, etc... Basically actively employed in a re-distribution of the products made by the robots. Government for example one can see as an instance of such basic income program (it just comes with such strings attached as spending 9to5 in the office and regular kissing of the lower back of your superior)
I believe an ultimate goal should be to reach the point where people don't need jobs.
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.
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.
AMZN can allow itself to implement infrastructure/process to use something like Al metal-air cells. Stick in, stick out, sent resulting Al oxide to re-processing. You'll get efficiency and range of at least gas engine without mess/maintenance. There are more advanced schemas available (like potassium based - more energy dense, easier for reprocessing), unfortunately most of the money is in Li based schemas which would make sense only if Li were to be the main by weight component, which isn't going to happen in any near future.
>Wide use of overhead power lines in cities makes drone delivery unsafe in cities.
that just control/sensor problem, pure tech and very solvable issue.
>I feel this is somewhat misguided
we need to utilize 3D en-mass, in particular for transportation. Whatever industry starts it doesn't really matter in big picture ... End result anyway will be an autonomous octocopter for commute :) (the autonomous cars Google develops will be great for trucks which will roam roads empty of people carrying cars)
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...
At the very least, it punishes people with a "fixed" world view.
I'm not sure what would make a good "beacon with address metadata" technology, but it seems worth thinking about.
I've seen the earlier news clips showing the drone delivering a package to the back porch of a house, which got a simple shrug out of me, but how's this envisioned at scale?
Do I look out my second story window and see a drone pass by every 10 minutes? Or is there initial use cases outside of residential that will be the first to adopt the technology?
I just want to see it with my own eyes, before actually seeing it with my own eyes.
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!"
I can see neighborhoods having these things, to attack overflying drones that have no purpose being near the neighborhood. Parks departments taking out drones from "no drones" parks. With all this type of automation, compliance will also have to be automated. It's impractical to call the cops and say "I've got a drone buzzing around the neighborhood".
Gas engines are heavy, compared to electric motors and lithium batteries, so for modest endurance flights, electric works out better now, but for long endurance flights gas or diesel would be better.
Curtis youngblood demo'd a nitromethane powered quad as seen here
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/curtis-youngblood-single...
I can't imagine anyone would use a nitro powered platform for any commercial use, the fuel is too expensive and the motors require too much maintenance.
We'll likely need new distributed protocols to be able to make group decisions about things, but I think we'll be able to get a long way just by making key information widely available.
It (displacement) does seem to be a huge risk and it's probably better to devise solutions now rather than after huge displacements have occurred.
Stringing taut wires is also hard and they are more susceptible to damage which require constant fixing (see Connecticut ~4 years ago).
Are those robots going to create increased demand for doctors, teachers, and nurses, by virtue of automating away a welding job? Is your typical factory worker a viable doctor? If I lost my developer job, I don't think I would make a viable doctor, and I am a fairly smart university educated person. Not everybody is cut out for that kind of work; I sure aren't.
> "soldiers"
Military inefficiencies aside, don't be so sure they'll be safe from automation either. Furthermore, I shudder to think what future developments would necessitate even more soldiers.
> "playwrights"
The arts may flourish with some form of basic income in place, but without it, it is doubtful that it will become a viable career that can feed families for a significant portion of ex-factory workers.
> "government clerks"
Definitely not safe from automation. Computer automation alone, no robots required, eliminates many of those sort of jobs.
(The opening a this book describes it pretty artistically. It is a mental shift one is forced to make. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_%22%D0%9F%22 )
Automation isn't just about factories full of robots, it is about software allowing 1 professional to do the job that 10-20 people used to do.
A field doesn't have to be fully automated before automation destroys the economic viability of the field for possible newcomers to it.
I guess at least companies are dreaming again and trying crazy ideas, aka "moonshots".
Sitting on "moonshot" sized piles of cash and having engineering pools of that scale, one can expect that at least some would try ... I mean actual placement of Amazon logo on the Moon (like say using 100 "dots" - very bright LED array panels) would cost only something like few billion dollars.