You might think I’m a Luddite, which is strange for a technology analyst. We’re supposed to be all in favor of new technology, no matter what. Part of it is that our paying customers are technology companies trying to sell the stuff, and, by extension, we’re supposed to be technology evangelists.
A number of my colleagues, whom I shall not name here, are quite good at putting on their galoshes and marching out into the muck in any weather. I’m a little more reticent. And perhaps that’s a good thing. I’d like to think so. Because not all technological advances are good, and we often dive in without a thought for unintended consequences.
If, simply by saying no, I could save one client from entering a doomed market, I would earn my keep many times over. Be that as it may, I have looked askance at a number of new technologies. Not, I will note,
In any event, this was how the reveal last weekend of
I totally get how it was a great free-advertising moment for Amazon, championed by its energetic CEO, Jeff Bezos. And, of course, it will go through all sorts of modifications before it actually comes to market. All we've seen thus far is a mesmerizing video.
And I admit that the idea of 30-minute delivery is beguiling, and if Amazon is successful,
Some of the issues have to do with structural changes underway in our society. The gap between rich and poor is opening day by day. A rich guy like Bezos can imagine a theoretically better way to do something, but ignore how this innovation will be received by the general public.
Let’s paint a plausible scenario. Mr. Jones, who lives within the feasible 10-mile radius of one of Amazon’s “fulfillment centers” and has a subscription to Prime Air (the octocopter delivery service), orders an item that weighs less than 5 lbs. The system derives his address’s GPS coordinates, and off the item goes.
Only, Mr. Jones lives in a dicey neighborhood, where many fathers of family have been out of work since 2008, and the economy has turned rather “informal.” He’s concerned that his delivery might not make it. He lives on the fifth floor of a walkup. The octocopter is not going to land on his fire escape; it’s going to come to earth somewhere near the front stoop.
But Amazon is clever and has played out this scenario in development labs, allowing Mr. Jones to click a box on his order that says to text him five minutes before the order is set to arrive. Thus, he has time to get downstairs before one of his neighbors makes off with his goodies. And Amazon gets to harvest his cell phone number.
Not bad. Except that there’s a guy waiting downstairs with a gun, interested in either the goods or the drone or both. Checkmate. Mr. Jones creeps back up the stairs.
I perused the odious comments sections of several articles on the Amazon delivery drone, and there were many good ol’ boys who couldn’t wait to treat one of those drones like a skeet and shoot it right out of the sky for fun — or perhaps because it deserves to die, representing as it does a world of people who never have to get their hands dirty, but who themselves are out of range. There’s a lot of anger in the land from which the techno-elite is for the most part insulated.
I tried to figure out how much one of these things might cost. Obviously, the first one has to carry all the R&D and probably tallies at tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. But once in production, they could be more reasonable.
An MQ-9 Reaper — a drone used in battlefields in Afghanistan and elsewhere — runs about $12.5 million. A Predator goes for $4-5 million. One site pegs the cost per flight hour of Predator and Reaper drones at $2,500-3,500. Their larger, more capable cousin, the Global Hawk, costs about $30,000 per flight hour, according to the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
I have to believe that Prime Air drones in production will cost less than that, but given all the redundancy and safety features that will inevitably be required, a number like $50,000 seems reasonable for acquisition cost. After all, these are not paper airplanes. Operating cost will likely be measured in hundreds of dollars per hour, but even at tens of dollars per hour, the margins on any goods delivered in such a manner would be wiped out — unless the package happens to contain a diamond necklace.
Which gets us back to people stealing the drones, the goods, or both.
But (with apologies to Dr. Seuss) that is not all, oh, no; that is not all!
These things are proposing to fly at low altitudes. Low-level airspace may at first appear to be something equivalent to unregulated spectrum, the type that’s used for WiFi signals in hotspots at
Then, there’s a scaling problem. If Prime Air were to become popular, traffic density at the fulfillment center would likely become overwhelming. The air-space right around these depots would be black with unmanned aerial vehicles all vying to get in or out of the hanger.
In the 60 Minutes segment during which Bezos revealed the drone, he said it would be years before Prime Air would be ready for prime time, but he indicated that the gating factor was not development but regulatory approval, which is at minimum two years away.
But the government, represented by the FAA, ought to be all in favor of Bezos’s plan because, once the citizenry is used to seeing these things in the sky, it’s that much easier for the National Security Agency (NSA) to put one up there that mimics the Amazon drone. After all, mimicry is established kit for the NSA. Field agents mimic journalists and diplomats every day.
So, keep an eye on that ol’ government approval. If it comes through super fast, well … welcome to the new age.
Twitter: RogerKay
