What if you could order something online and have it delivered not in two days, not the next day, but within 30 minutes … by air.
Sound like science fiction? It’s not, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
In a segment on CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Bezos previewed the online retailer’s next rapid-delivery gambit: using unmanned, eight-rotor drones (dubbed octocopters) to deliver packages right to customers’ doorsteps. Bezos said that the company’s goal when the program, dubbed Prime Air, is launched in “some number of years” is to deliver these ersatz aerial parcels within half an hour. The drones would have a range of 10 miles from Amazon’s regional distribution centers located in many metropolitan areas around the U.S.
Surprisingly, the biggest obstacle to such futuristic deliveries is no longer technological, but bureaucratic: getting permission to launch all those unmanned drones (which navigate via preprogramed GPS coordinates for each order) into the country’s metropolitan airspaces.
“We’ll be ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,” Amazon said of the new program. “Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.” The company also envisioned a time in the near future when these drones—which seem like a fantastical idea today—will be quite commonplace: “One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today.”
I have a number of conflicted reactions to this story. On the purely whiz-bang level, I have to admit this is one of the more amazing tech stories I’ve seen recently. The prospect of little helicopters ferrying stuff around is just really, really cool. I can imagine ordering something and going out to wait on the porch … just to watch my own little personal drone zoom into my front yard.
On the other hand, there’s a part of me that also feels like the prospect of little helicopters ferrying stuff around is, well, a tad creepy—like something you would see in a Terminator sequel flashback right before the scene where the machines take over everything.
But leaving aside for a moment the technological question of whether this is a good idea or not, I think Amazon’s announcement speaks most loudly to our increasingly impatient, consumeristic culture. It’s not enough to get a good deal. It’s not enough to get a good deal and fast delivery. No, we want the best deal on the best product, and we want it right now—even faster, perhaps, than we could get it by driving to a store—so much so that there’s a company seriously pondering (nay, developing) miniature unmanned helicopters to meet that demand.
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