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Where are the delivery drones?

    Jeff Bezos said Amazon drones would be bringing toothpaste and cat food to Americans’ homes within four or five years. That was almost nine years ago. oops.

    This week, Amazon said it plans to begin its first drone deliveries in the US sometime in 2022, perhaps in a California city.

    Today’s newsletter answers two questions: What takes so long for drone deliveries? And are they better than other ways of getting goods to our doorstep?

    The bottom line: For the foreseeable future, drone deliveries will be useful for a small number of products in a limited number of places under certain conditions. But due to technical and financial constraints, drones are unlikely to be the future of large-scale parcel delivery.

    Drone delivery is a significant improvement for some tasks, such as bringing medicines to people in remote areas. But that’s less ambitious than the big drone dream that Bezos and others presented to the public.

    Why are drones so difficult?

    Mini-aircraft operating without human control face two main obstacles: the technology is complex and governments have required a lot of bureaucracy – often for good reason. (In the US, the regulatory issues have been largely resolved.)

    Dan Patt, an accomplished drone engineer and senior fellow in the Hudson Institute’s research group, said he and I could make our own delivery drone in a garage for less than $5,000 in about a week. The basics are not that difficult.

    But the real world is infinitely complex and drones can’t handle it. At high speeds, drones must accurately “see” and navigate around buildings, electrical wires, trees, other aircraft and people before landing on the ground or sending packages down from a height. GPS can fail for a split second and cause the drone to crash. There is little room for error.

    “Solving the first part of the problem is very simple,” Patt said. “It’s really hard to solve the full problem of making drone delivery completely robust.”

    The typical approach of technologists is to think smaller, meaning drones should be limited to relatively straightforward settings. The Zipline startup focused on using drones to deliver blood and medical supplies to health centers in relatively dispersed parts of Rwanda and Ghana, where driving was difficult. A typical suburb or city is more complex and vehicle deliveries are better alternatives. (Lockeford, California, where Amazon is planning its first US drone deliveries, has a few thousand people living in mostly dispersed households.)

    That’s still an incredible feat, and over time, drones are becoming more and more capable of making deliveries in other types of environments.

    The even trickier problem, Patt said, is that drone deliveries usually don’t make economic sense. It’s cheap to cram another package onto a UPS delivery truck. But drones can’t carry that much. They can’t make many stops in one flight. People and vehicles still have to take the cat food and toothpaste to where the drones take off.

    “I think it’s small markets, small concepts, niche usage for the next 10 years,” Patt said. “It’s not going to scale up to replace everything.” Some people who work on drones are more optimistic than Patt, but we’ve seen similar optimism fall short in other areas.

    Overpromising and undercaring

    The parallels between drones and driverless cars always struck me. Drone technologists told me that, as with driverless cars, they misjudge the challenge and overestimate the potential of computer-controlled vehicles.

    Reliable delivery with drones and driverless cars are a good idea, but they may never be as widespread as technologists thought.

    We keep making the same mistakes with automated technology. For decades, technologists continued to say that driverless cars, computers that reason like humans, and robotic factory workers would soon be ubiquitous and better than before. We want to believe them. And when the vision doesn’t come true, disappointment sets in.

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    Brian X. Chenothe consumer technology columnist for The New York Times, suggests ways to make our (non-drone-delivered) online shopping a little bit kinder to the planet.

    • Resist instant gratification. If you don’t need an item right away, choose the slowest shipping time. Next-day or same-day deliveries often mean parcel companies opt for speed over efficiency – more plane flights and more miles driven contributing to pollution.

    • Use less cardboard. There is an option called Amazon Day Delivery that allows people to choose a specific day of the week and combine multiple orders into one delivery. The items are also packed in fewer boxes. In addition, Amazon offers “frustration-free packaging” for some items that eliminates some unnecessary packaging. Choosing one of these options will reduce your cardboard and plastic consumption.

    • If it’s practical, buy second-hand. For many Amazon listings, there is an option to buy the used product. For many items, from cast iron cookware to screwdrivers, it makes perfect sense to buy something that has had little use before it was returned. You give a product a second life and save yourself a few bucks.

    • A former video producer at Google sued the company, claiming he was fired after complaining about the influence of a religious cult at work. Cade Metz and Dai Wakabayashi unraveled a strange story about software, winemaking and higher consciousness.

    • In the world of ransomware haggling: Bloomberg News described the work of negotiators dealing with criminals who lock down organizations’ computer systems until they are paid off. (A subscription may be required.)

    • A crypto workplace collapses during a crypto market collapse. My colleagues Ryan Mac and David Yaffe-Bellany report on the boss of a cryptocurrency company who told employees to quit if they disagreed with him on issues like women’s intelligence and gender identity.

    Birds are rad. Here’s a mockingbird that mimics the sounds of a car alarm, police siren and mobile phone.

    We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you want us to discover. You can reach us at ontech@CBNewz.

    If you have not yet received this newsletter in your inbox, then sign up here† You can also read previous On Tech columns†