Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2013, as news. “On Sunday” refers to Amazon’s Prime Air announcement on 1 December 2013, and the “four to five years” forecast has expired: Amazon only began limited drone deliveries in a few US locations from 2022.
Amazon surprised us on Sunday when it announced its experiment with small unmanned aircraft to deliver parcels to people’s homes in 30 minutes. Jeff Bezos hopes to resolve some legal gaps so that his drone delivery service can be up and running within the next four to five years.
Amazon has called this delivery service Prime Air. The human chain would be broken at the point where, for now, a person places the box to be delivered on a conveyor belt. The drones, called Octocopters, pick up the box and are already programmed to carry it to the buyer’s home. This video shows how it works.
Watch: Amazon Prime Air drone delivery demonstration
A big step forward for the company and a big step forward for technology and science, but one that is already starting to raise concerns about an overly robotised future that is gradually doing away with human labour.
If this is the future of the home delivery business, investors should start working out which companies would make these “giant mosquitoes”, and which courier companies could be hit hardest if they don’t “upgrade”.
That said, we shouldn’t forget the difficulties these drones would face in cities. It would be very hard to pull off at first, but who knows…
As we can see, Bezos is a man of big ideas within his industry and company, and he has set out to make Amazon one of the most important companies in history.
Further reading
Featured image: William Warby from London, England, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}