Rockstar Games 2002 open world action adventure gem, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had a helicopter RC mission that was designed by Satan himself. Not only are the controls ridiculously unintuitive, it’s a timed mission as well. Seven minutes of hell that might cause you to uninstall the game and never play it again.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed an experimental drone-based delivery service on Sunday, in an ambitious move by the online retailer to capitalize on a technology still being used sparsely by American businesses. Bezos said the service, dubbed Amazon Prime Air, could be ready for customer use in “four or five years.”
Bezos said the autonomous drone could carry objects of up to 5 lbs within a 10-mile radius of an Amazon distribution center.
Imagine this Jetsons-like retro future fantasy becoming reality. (At first, I couldn’t believe this story wasn’t a hoax.) Parcels being delivered to your door almost immediately! More accurately: in 30 minutes. We have arrived at that moment in time where we need to stop being practical and just embrace the whimsical.
It will happen eventually. Not in five years. I’d give it 20.
Let me ask you something, have you tried to buy anything from a big box store lately? The last few times I’ve been to one of these entities have made me say “eff it, I’ll get it at Amazon.” That should be Amazon’s slogan. You walk into a store and try to buy something simple. Headphones, a USB cable, anything at all, and the kid who works there turns the experience into an eternal, unfunny, episode of Beavis and Butthead.
And yes, I’ve heard the snark pretty much everywhere. The Robotz is taking our jobz. PLEASE.
Bemoaning a coming technological change will not stop it. I would absolutely paraphrase that line from Terminator about the drone not feeling remorse or pity and that it absolutely will not stop until your holiday gifts have been delivered, but that would just be wrong. Technology is not a living entity. It is the sum total of choices that actual humans make.
Nearly every other technological revolution has resulted in more, not less people being employed. Who’s going to buy all those products Amazon is shipping?
It kinda is the same thing. Less secretaries are required for filing and typing in many situations now because a lot more can be done by one person with a computer than could be done by one person with a typewriter and filing cabinet. There is also the messengers and postal services that seen a huge drop in business because e-mail was suddenly an easier and cheaper way of sending business correspondence than letters are. Now we may have fewer secretaries per business but we also have more IT workers to start to balance it out.
This need not cause “mass unemployment” either. It may just require a shift in vocation for a percentage of the population. Those who would be replaced (no offense to postal workers and delivery people, but their jobs are dated like Blockbuster laughing off Netflix) would need to retrain, yes, but it is not impossible to do that. It is possible that some of the workers and potential workers may even end up in jobs that involve the manufacture or maintenence of drones.The internal combustion engine pretty much killed the livery business. The making, selling and hiring of carriages and saddles and so on has become a niche industry, not the thing that was once required in order to have a fully functioning twentieth century society. Those involved in those industries either kept it up as a niche craft (many people will still want certain documents and packages delivered by hand for many years to come, I’m sure) or they found work elsewhere.
I’m almost positive that industry leaders wouldn’t be chasing after the tech dollar if it was going to bankrupt them in the end. Do you really think that this guy is thinking that in five years he’ll make a clean fortune getting rid of human delivery services and then be happy when that practically momentary peak is nigh on useless to him three years later because nobody can buy stuff from him? The guy is pretty intelligent, I’m sure he’s looking pretty far down the road to make sure he will still be able to afford a bottle of milk without needing six months worth of profits in his pocket.
If we ever get to a point where human labor is completely useless and practically everything is done by machine, then I reckon we’ll have to have a serious rethink about this whole money idea. For now, though, I don’t see how me getting my pre-ordered games half an hour after midnight instead of ten hours after is as economically apocalyptic as many seem to think it is.
However, Once this technology makes it down to the pizza delivery level it’s going to ruin porn story lines forever.
-Dagobot
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