The FAA is likely to say "no." I can't remember what crash it was in the '80s that took us from the glorious future where all the jet setters got off their private helicopters on their skyscraper rooftops (remember Tron? Remember Runaway? Remember how everybody was doing that in the movies in 1983?) to the current mundane "law enforcement, news and life safety only" universe, but it was literally one crash. A 10kg drone simply experiencing a power failure at 500 feet gives you an impact energy equivalent to a hand grenade. There are reasons to use this technology. "You're too lazy to schlep your ass to the Apple Store and too impatient to wait for a fucking truck" is not one of them. If I had to bet on package delivery in 2026, I'd bet on Fedex Home Delivery, only not Fedex. It'll be privateers, organized into a loose fleet, working as independent contractors. 3D printing is nice for prototyping but sucks for manufacturing. The materials strength will never be there and the materials cost is shockingly high. The price will come down but 3D printing technology will never compete. Even if I'm using the exact same polymer, injection molding it gives me a real leg up as far as durability, flexibility and tensile strength over layered deposition. And hey - if I need to work with, you know, metals and wood and composites and glass and Lexan and Plex and pretty much anything other than Cheez Whiz, it's no contest.
Oh I fucking agree. That was my overriding thought during that stupid demonstration video -- there's no way in hell the FAA even thinks about it. What altitude do they fly at (although isn't it true that under 1000 feet or something, you can fly anything without the FAA's approval? Or is that private non-commercial only? I don't know crap about this.) etc. What if they try to make a delivery to Buck in East Texas but they fly over Johnny Redneck's land on the way and he fucking blows them out of the sky? EDIT: it's nice to be right. What if they crash? Who's responsible for the forest fire that starts? I've read links you've posted in the past pointing out exactly what the flaws and strengths of 3D are, that was mostly a tongue in cheek thing. Although it really is hard to know where we'll be even 15 years from now. I like your idea -- I can imagine a crowdsourced app similar to the ones for carpooling with strangers: going from Austin to Dallas tomorrow? Have a trustworthy rating on YouFedex app? Take these packages here and here for 10 percent...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/technology/drones-with-an-... So right now, cops'n'fire gets anything under 2 kilos, under 400 feet. Two years from now, the FAA gets to rule what "safe" integration is. Likely they will say "under 2 kilos, under 400 feet, NO AUTONOMOUS ACTIVITY. 'cuz that's the thing. I've got a Syma S107 and it's a toy. You run it into a wall and it won't even really mess up the paint. But I've also got a Blade MSRX. You hit yourself in the ankle with it and it might draw blood. It weighs a whopping 31g and has the payload capacity for a keyring camera. You get up into the 300, 400, 700 series birds and suddenly you're talking 3.3 kilos. That's the bird, by the way, that will take off the top of your head if you screw up in just the right way. And that's with someone responsible for it. And, as per my post on the Amazon Air thing, you don't get useful with these things until you're in the 10 kilo universe. The ethical situations associated with UAVs are legion. PW Singer's "Wired for War" covers most of them. And while piloted rotorcraft are allowed over private property, unpiloted anythings aren't. Which means these things would have to fly down the street. Might as well send a truck.Under the new law, within 90 days, the F.A.A. must allow police and first responders to fly drones under 4.4 pounds, as long as they keep them under an altitude of 400 feet and meet other requirements. The agency must also allow for “the safe integration” of all kinds of drones into American airspace, including those for commercial uses, by Sept. 30, 2015. And it must come up with a plan for certifying operators and handling airspace safety issues, among other rules.
Really good NYT article that answers a lot of my questions. Still, I can't help but think that in some shape or form -- just not one so trivial as Amazon delivery -- having drones become a familiar sight in domestic skies is inevitable in the next 30 years or so. Whatever ruling the FAA comes down with will have to bend eventually, I'd put money on it.
Yeah, the stunt copter guys worry me a little. Something about 2-stroke nitromethane engines attached to carbon fiber sword blades being made to pirouette around the sky in ways real airframes can't.
3D printing may take off, though the quality seems to be something of an issue at present. From the 60 Minutes interview, it seems like Amazon is trying to move into providing things like original series, high end clothing and groceries, which are things that are unlikely to be printed at home for a long while yet or at all. As wildly impractical as it is, I love the old-futuristic notion of a massive network of pneumatic tubes transporting packages.
Another thing I got from 60 Minutes was that if they're going to stick to the 30-minute rule they're going to need to have inventory in warehouses all over the place, which kinda defeats the point of Amazon in the first place. EDIT: god I shouldn't post when I'm tired.
Amazon isn't likely to meet many competitors because they're not profitable. You look at their model and go "wow, that's a lot of money to spend in order to break even in 20 years." 85% of the world's hazelnuts are grown in two counties in Oregon. That hasn't changed since WWII. The reason is that a hazelnut tree is a useful producer for about 30 years… and at current and historic prices, the break-even point for commercial hazelnut production is 18 years. So nobody plants them. If it's going to take eighteen years for you to recoup your investment and barely a decade of profitability before you're back in it, you're going to find something else to plant. I think what's far more likely to happen is for shipping to get more expensive, local goods to improve their edge and the global hegemony of internationally-sourced goods to decrease. It isn't a feel-good farmer's market thing by my reckoning, it's a "leather goods made in Los Angeles that cost $8 extra to make are suddenly price-competitive when shipping leather goods from Vietnam costs $8."
How might this come about? Is it happening already? Also, I didn't know that about hazelnut trees.I think what's far more likely to happen is for shipping to get more expensive, local goods to improve their edge and the global hegemony of internationally-sourced goods to decrease. It isn't a feel-good farmer's market thing by my reckoning, it's a "leather goods made in Los Angeles that cost $8 extra to make are suddenly price-competitive when shipping leather goods from Vietnam costs $8.
Increasing energy costs. There's a reason China pushed heavily into Kazakhstan and Nigeria - they know we've got the Middle East and South America sewn up and they need oil, too. The Hubbert Peak remains controversial and difficult to gauge, but there are reasons to believe the Saudis hit it in 2010. We're now developing tar sand and oil shale in Canada which means we aren't going to run out of oil soon, but it's going to get more expensive. Double the cost of bunker oil and you've effectively doubled the cost of international shipping. There's also China's Yuan/dollar peg. Should China decide to let the Yuan set its own exchange rate it'll go up by 50-100%. That fucks up your import/export costs, too. Nobody knows that about hazelnut trees. One has to have spent a considerable amount of time researching orchard crops to learn these sorts of things. You are now aware that that raspberry you ate came from Whatcom County, WA, more likely than not.
I love that the link has a list of miscellaneous definitions. That's really very helpful! I was just listening to the radio at lunch and caught a part of a conversation where one of the commenters said that he thought that the tax breaks the U.S. government gives to oil companies is a major obstacle to alternative forms of energy. Since you didn't mention anything about alternative forms of energy and as you point out, countries are still aggressively pursuing stable sources of oil, do you think that alternative sources of energy are likely to be viable in the near future?
Energy systems are complex. I don't fully understand them. A lot of my historical reading has given me an appreciation for "The Great Game" and has convinced me that, in all honesty, I would have played the middle east in almost the exact same way, warfare, strife, revolution, oppression and all. That said, there's a reason China is pushing so hard into solar. There's a reason T Boone Pickens pushed so hard into wind. There's a reason Elon Musk is pushing so hard into solar. Most of the Preppers are of a mind that "energy" is going to up and go away, causing a massive collapse. Most anybody with a non-apocalyptic worldview will simply notice that energy will just get more expensive, which makes the more expensive, extant sources more attractive. Check the chart. It's all going up but turbine and small scale, and heliostats, solar and wind aren't even on there. Turbine and small scale are going down largely because of fracking.
I believe that wind and solar fall under "Small Scale", if I understand the note at the bottom of the table. I've seen you mention your historical reading in the past, in regard to the Middle-East. What would you recommend reading as kind of a primer on The Great Game? Or, what might I read to start understanding it better?