There's been plenty of attention paid to Amazon's demonstration of delivering small packages by drones. But as technology previews go, this wasn't too impressive. For me, future technology is exciting if there's a high ratio of life-changing to how difficult-of-implementation.
The Amazon drones won't be that fast, and there's a host of yet-to-be solved problems with huge numbers of tiny flying things. There's also the fact that it can't really hold that much. Not only will it not be able to deliver a big order, the fact that it can't carry many people's orders means that there are going to have to be thousands of them, each ferrying a small order between the warehouse and one customer.
It's also a bit of a backward step in terms of centralization. In order to deliver in reasonable time, there'll have to be a warehouse in your town. Having an Amazon warehouse/droneport in each city would cost a fortune.
So for all these reasons I'm assuming Amazon isn't about to get into drone delivery, and this was just a publicity stunt. If not, I'll be hoping that 3-D printing makes the very idea of delivering objects obsolete first.
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