Drones will begin delivering blood and medicine in the US
Amar Toor for The Verge:
A startup that uses drones to deliver medicine and blood to remote areas of Rwanda is launching a similar program in the US. California-based Zipline will bring its drone delivery program to rural and remote communities in Maryland, Nevada, and Washington, including some Native American reservations. Zipline will announce its expansion at a White House workshop on unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) Tuesday morning.
This is a dronie. A drone selfie.
Amazon Drones: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap
Amazon Drones: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap
The naysayers were out in force. “Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon’s Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense,” bleated Wired‘s Marcus Wohlsen. Dan Lyons reacted to the piece with a condemnation of “the credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes,” again complaining that drone deliveries are “years away.” The Guardian‘s James Bell dismissed it as “little more than a publicity stunt,” and added: “what happens when next door’s kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?” And Slate called it “hot air” and compared it to an April Fool’s joke.
What is wrong with these people? Do they moonlight as stock analysts who only care about the next quarter’s results? Do they have no vision at all? Do they not care about anything unless it will directly interact with them tomorrow, or at the absolute latest, next year? They’re the same ilk who, I’m sure, claimed that credit cards would never work, that merchants would never adopt them, that people would not use them, that fraud would make their use untenable.
I fully agree with Jon Evans. People say it won’t happen. But can you now imagine a world where this kind of stuff does not exist? I’m not sure. It looks like it’s bound to happen. “Is it bad?” is the correct question, not “will it happen?”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a drone-delivery service for Amazon Prime customers, Amazon Prime Air yesterday on 60 minutes.
That’s what I was thinking about here.
You can learn more about it here.
Don’t expect it before a number of years, though.
Dyson challenged its engineers to build machines that can fly and go through obstacles. Only Dyson-manufactured parts were allowed.
Drones and Silicon Valley, an early marriage
Drones and Silicon Valley, an early marriage
On Wednesday, a drone start-up called Airware plans to announce that it has raised $10.7 million in a round of financing led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures, the investment arm of the search giant, is also pitching in money.
Although the term drone conjures up images of unmanned military planes that can shoot missiles from the sky, Airware is developing technology for the budding array of commercial uses for unmanned aerial vehicles, as they are also known. The company, based in Newport Beach, Calif., and founded by former aerospace engineers from Boeing and other companies, has created a combination of hardware and software that can be added to drones made by other companies to make them more programmable, Jonathan Downey, the chief executive of Airware, said in an interview.
The dronepocalypse is coming, with delivery services and more.
What disturbs me is the idea that a book about the moral hazard of military technologies should be written as if it was going to be read by robots: input decision procedure, output decision and correlated action. I know that effective military operations have traditionally been based on the chain of command and that this looks a little like the command and control structure of robots. When someone is shooting at you, I can only imagine that you need to follow orders mechanically. The heat of battle is neither the time nor the place for cool ethical reflection.
Warfare, unlike philosophy, could never be conducted from an armchair. Until now. For the first time in history, some soldiers have this in common with philosophers: they can do their jobs sitting down. They now have what I’ve always enjoyed, namely “leisure,” in the Hobbesian sense of the word, meaning they are not constantly afraid of being killed.
Drone pilots get as much stress disorders as pilots actually in combat
A new study led by the United States’ Defense Department found that pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, experienced PTSD, depression and anxiety as much as pilots who are actually “over there”.
“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”
Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.
Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.
Interesting.
When the US government kills its own citizens
A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” – even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.
The memo can be found here.
A drone delivery service
What about a drone delivery service that could easily replace any country’s postal service, and Fedex?
Here’s a simplified version of what I’m talking about:
1. I put package onto a landing pad at my home.
2. Drone arrives, takes package and flies away.
3. Drone delivers package to landing pad at delivery location.
There’s almost nothing technically in the way of this happening right now.
Here’s how it would work in practice:
My brother left his iphone at my house. I want to get it to him, but he lives 30 mi away (as the crow flies, 50 by driving).
I put it into a delivery container and put it on a small landing pad outside my home.
I order a drone on my phone and put the ID of the container into the order (I could just as easily use a drone I buy to do it P2P).
A drone arrives 10 minutes later, picks up the container automatically.
After a couple of hops, it arrives at my brother’s landing pad, where it drops off the container and alerts him with an e-mail/text.
Costs? Probably less than $0.25 per 10 mi. or so. So, about $0.75 in this instance. Time? An hour or so.