Are These the Drones You're Looking For?

          So it indeed has been a while between posts, but forgive me for thinking that the entire month of November is not only my birthday month but also Thanksgiving, which I decided to take off. Hopefully these new “drones” made by Amazon Prime Air will not take as much time to deliver the order as I take to create a new post. I am sure many of you have seen this commercial, but it is here if you have not. Although this first looks like just another fanciful futuristic flight plan made by Amazon just to show how quickly they can actually deliver the product, according to the company’s CEO, Jeff Bozos, it could very much become a possibility within the next couple years, around 2015. This statement draws much skepticism from all sources, and many of them do have a base for the criticism.

            One of the biggest things I find wrong with this is that in order to deliver the product, the drones need to fly through the air, which can be a major safety hazard. I mean, everything comes with a risk, but this one probably has more than usual. For an example, if you were to walk onto a plane and told that there was no pilot, but instead a robot, not even one with a physical body, just a type of consciousness, would you really go through with the flight? Another thing is that these drones would also have cameras on them, which could monitor people and take pictures of houses, and in the end, would there be much of a difference between military drones to control outsiders to these drones that would control internal problems? It would be a huge violation of privacy, and we would have to put a lot of trust into the government to not spy or creep in on us, which if we learned anything from the NSA or WikiLeaks, it is that we really cannot. Sure, we could program these robots to not be able to keep the stuff, but robots have to be programmed precisely otherwise they do something completely different, and as an avid member of the robotics team, I can guarantee this.

            This would bring me to my next point, which is that it would be extremely difficult to achieve this by the end of the decade, much less 2015. It would take a lot of work to make sure there would not be any bugs in the program, and to make it completely safe. There is also the issue of fuel, since it would take a lot of gas to do its task. This guaranteed is going to take longer than a year unless all their resources are developing, which is not a fantastic business plan. I still do not think that this would be too great of an idea, because the delivery service give people jobs, and the unemployment rate would rise. Sure, some new jobs will be created, but not as many, and it would be in a different field of work. One final thing I find wrong with this is that it would make everything much more mechanized, which is not a bad thing in an industrial society and continuously upgrading technology, but has anyone not seen I, Robot because like humans, robots could rebel, and although there are the laws of robotics that supposedly protect people from them, but it is not like people break society’s laws at all, am I right?