Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
Humans are expensive and error-prone.
Weird, they seem to have done just fine delivering things for centuries now…
Define “just fine”? Needless deaths and property damage are caused by human drivers all the time. I mean we could deliver things “just fine” on foot but everyone would be waiting a lot longer…
All the time? I’d like to see the statistics on deaths caused by delivery drivers.
And I’m not sure why you think similar things wouldn’t happen with drones.
According to The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety:
How many of those were package delivery drivers?
…why would they? Even in the rare occurrence that it were to fall out of the sky there’s very little chance it would hit anyone. And even in the exceptionally rare occurrence that it were to hit someone, they’re incredibly light and unlikely to cause serious damage, much less kill anyone.
…unless it’s in a city.
…unless it’s a large drone carrying a heavy package.
If we’re going to replace delivery drivers with drones, they have to be able to carry more than a single five-pound item.
Even harder in a city since it would have to nosedive between buildings.
One of many reasons they have weight limits.
They’ll likely never replace them entirely.
You know there are places in cities with tons of pedestrians, right? And sometimes things from high up fall on them and kill them, right?
Also, if they have weight limits, we won’t be replacing drivers with them. There will still be drivers. So I’m not sure how this saves lives.
And they did just fine plowing up fields by hand.
Replacing the hand plow with the horse plow didn’t needlessly cost anyone their job.
How did you determine this? Also why are you assuming a job is in itself a good thing instead of what the job does being a good thing?
Because the same farmer was plowing the same field.
And a job is better than no job in the Western world if you want to eat and have a roof over your head.
Omg seriously? Do you have any freaken idea how developing world farming works? This is freaken sad. Ok fine. In the real world it wasn’t a farmer it was a farming family. Children as young as 3 would work the land. Being able to use an animal to plow unleashed abundant food and freed up multiple members of the family.
Yes having a job is better than not but that doesn’t mean you are entailed to a make work job because you refuse to use your brains.
When Amazon fires all of the delivery people for to save money, what are all of those delivery people supposed to do to buy things so that they can survive? People seem to think ‘just get another job’ is a viable answer to thousands of people out of work.
I don’t think your hypothetical is very likely especially in anything resembling the short term. These drones can lift a can of soup, not exactly a couch.
However if drones gradually replace drivers the drivers will get new jobs. The reason why this is being suggested to you repeatedly is because it is the solution to the problem. The cure for automation isn’t to stick your head in the dirt and demand your degrading jobs back the cure is training.
That seems extremely unlikely to me.