Should companies start using drones for common tasks, like package delivery?

One of the really depressing things about American media is that hundreds of people could be killed by delivery drivers each year and it wouldn't make local news but the first time one person anywhere gets killed by a delivery drone it's going to be an international headline and the idiot public will be in arms about Amazon's deadly attack drones.

If I had mod points, you'd get 'em all.

hundreds of people could be killed by delivery drivers each year and it wouldn't make local news but the first time one person anywhere gets killed by a delivery drone it's going to be an international headline

Im not claiming that "public perception" of safety issues is proper, but neither is your understanding of it

The two situations you compare **are not equivalent**

Delivery trucks are drive live, in real time, but a **human driver** who can be held responsible for any negligence.

A drone failure has no accountability except for an abstract "system"....we all know that someone somewhere along the line coded the behavior, but still that doesn't make these the same

People understand that "accidents happen" just by the law of averages...the reason why we can tolerate it is that if someone is negligent, Ex: a Drunk Driver, then they can be held accountable.

A drone improperly programmed is not the same.

I'm not saying my point means drone delivery is a bad idea, I'm just countering your particular false notion because it is not helpful to the discussion

"I'm ok with it but it is not economically viable as a replacement"

I can't help but think the question is worded in the same way as Amazon's whole "60 Minutes" story.

We've had "remote control" helicopters since the 60s at least.

"drones" in this context mean mini-copters that are programmed to fly themselves.

again, "autopilot" is not a new concept at all

We've had this technology for years. Just because it is marginally cheaper to make, and significantly easier to program doesn't mean that the ***other*** reasons the tech wasn't viable will not still be in play.

This /. Poll assumes that "drone deliver" is not hype.

Unfortunately, that's all Amazon's drone delivery is....it's Marketing to advertise their "cutting edgeness"

> the first time one person anywhere gets killed by a delivery drone it's going to be an international headline

The CIA would like you to define "delivery", since they may have some headline examples to provide.

You are why we can't have nice thing.

Look, it's something cool!
I'm gunna' shoot it.

Those laws already exist. If I shoot a gun at somebody's head, the police don't put the bullet on trial. It doesn't matter if the bullet has firmware and wings.

If Amazon's drone hits somebody, Amazon--not the drone--will be sued in court by the injured party. If the people controlling the drone--the software engineer, the CEO, whomever--intentionally or recklessly caused the person to be hit, those people would be criminally charged by the state.

Are all you people still in a Thanksgiving stupor? You don't need a law degree to understand this stuff.

No new laws are needed to "regulate" something like Prime Air. Like, literally. Anything that could go wrong is already accounted for, mostly by the 500+ year common law, but also by state and local ordinances which are smart and flexible enough to handle this kind of thing. The only thing that needs to change are federal laws which prohibit any activity of this kind whatsoever.

We haven't had the capability theoretically or otherwise to design small, affordable and relatively capable autonomous vehicles that can navigate arbitrary landscapes with collision avoidance to keep pedestrians safe until now.

Packaging the necessary computing capability, sensors and navigation equipment to accomplish this is more than just a bit easier than it was 30 yes ago. It wasn't possible or the military would have been using automated surveilance drones then instead of just the last decade or so. If it was just a matter of a bit of R&D why did we have spy satellites and planes like the SR-71 before such simple craft as a Predator drone?

I'm an aerospace engineer not just some random dolt who jabbers on about flying cars and jet packs. If you really think that these types of autonomous drones didn't exist because there's no economic or strategic value to them, you don't have much of an imagination. Amazon sees them as the ability to deliver things anywhere in a city in minutes without needing to pay for a fleet of trucks and the necessary personnel on standby. The military and (unfortunately) the police and intelligence organizations see them as a way to cheaply monitor an area and gather data to more efficiently direct their forces. If you don't see that, it doesn't really matter. The technology will progress and drag you along with it, even if you don't recognize that it's happening.

Yes, exactly like that. If you'd actually read that Wikipedia article you would have noticed the program failed because it wasn't reliable and it was easier to launch it with rockets from a B52 than to improve the control systems to safely handle separation.

Thanks for proving my point.

When there are thousands of cars driving around all the time it will be impossible to tell which is a good car and which is a bad car. Sure, the police may know, but we won't. Hell, even the police may not be able to tell the difference.

Imagine a few hundred cars filled with explosives driving from a mile away from the Super Bowl. How are you going to stop them in the short time it would take for them to get to the stadium?

Get my point?

I love technology as much as anyone here

But you love ludditism more.

No. They can't do it realistically.

OF course it would make local news if Little Johnny got killed because he wandered behind a backing-up UPS truck in the street. Tragic accident, negligent parents, etc. But if a 20-pound drone gets clobbered by a Canada Goose and falls onto Johnny's head, making him exactly as dead as the UPS truck would have, it would be front and center in countless national/international news outlets. You know this is true.

So...the programmer that wrote the code, or the QA guy who signed off on it, or the software engineer who designed it, or the platform guy who deployed it, or the product manager who owned it, or the CEO who ordered it, or the hardware engineer who designed the drone, or the factory worker who assembled it, or...all of them? Criminal liability in an autonomous system is not as clear-cut as you make it seem. Now, this isn't new - some percentage of cars fail catastrophically and kill people (not because of driver error) and some of those may be because of errors of people at $car_company - but that isn't to say that we have it totally under control.

In a not too far past, we needed about 100 times the people to run the farms, now a harvest is done by a single guy on a single huge machine.

In a more recent past, we needed about 100 times the people to operate the factories. Now they've been replaced by robots.

Yet unemployment rates are well below the 90% you might expect considering all those farm hands and factory workers that have been made obsolete.

Somehow cutting menial jobs and replacing them by machines has done a pretty good job in improving the overall livelihoods of the people in developed countries. It may hurt those delivery drivers in the short run, soon enough they'll move on and find other jobs.

If you want to call yourself an engineer you'll have to take responsibility for your work. Just like all the other engineers do [nspe.org]. Otherwise you're just a code monkey.

Imagine a few hundred helium balloons with baskets filled with explosives launched a mile away from the Super Bowl. How will you stop them? What about airplanes? Home made morters? Suicide bombers? Timed bombs? There are a ton of different things that could cause that sort of carnage.

I'm not sold on drones either, but suggesting that they would usher in an era of easy, quick terrorism strikes me as a slightly paranoid argument.

There is no society on earth that can prevent someone sufficiently motivated from causing mass carnage. Our error since 9/11 is believing that somehow, with the right mix of intrusion, paranoia and technology, we could stop it all.

Today more than ever we have nothing to fear but fear itself.