Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a grand plan (or a high decibel PR stunt perfectly timed to co-incide with the start of American holiday shopping season, if you like) to use unmanned drones, dubbed Amazon Prime Air, to deliver goods to customers within 30 minutes of ordering online.
Is he a visionary? We will know in 4-5 years. If all the technological and legal hurdles are crossed successfully by amazon.com and they start using drones as a delivery vehicle, you can expect to live in a neighbourhood that’s abuzz with these drones making deliveries.
Whether or not Amazon Prime Air takes flight, we feel we ought to credit Bezos with taking a technology that is available (though not fully mature) developing a commercial application for it – that too one that no one else has thought of and launching it right at the start of the shopping season. One only wishes that one of our home grown shopping websites had come up with the idea – imagine the worldwide press that it would have received.
Before we start lampooning the idea and Bezos, let us remember that it was just a 100 years ago that the Wright brothers were ridiculed for trying to fly metal through the air. That said, let us now get to the lampooning bit.
If you look at the video, you can see it delivering a package in the frown lawn of a house and the occupants immediately come out and retrieve the package (before being suitably happy and surprised). Our office, for eg. is on the first floor of a building and can the drone come into the building (that has a side entrance to boot) navigate the stairs and come to the first floor? I cannot imagine it making a delivery through the window either, how will it know which window corresponds to my office cabin? Even if it did somehow figure out which window I’m available at, my window has a grill though which the package cannot navigate.
The other major concern is about the drone’s ability to avoid other objects, especially people. It could be stated that the drone is a potentially hazardous flying object, considering that it is expected to fly within populated areas at low altitudes.
Privacy concerns are also being thrown up – drones are bound to have eyes and ears on them, and letting it fly into residential neighbourhoods legally would potentially violate privacy rules in many countries.
The last concern, at least for amazon, seems to be protecting the drone itself from people – teenagers and competitors.
To sum up, Amazon Prime Air is both exiting and terrifying and is a good example of how to drum up publicity.
Information Security, SSAE 16, ISO 27001, CISA, Cert-IN