Amazon Prime Air
In a few years we will be in a fabulous and impatient science fiction-esque world with unmanned vehicles flying stuff to your very front door. But this is not appearing on the awesome Scifiward website as it is soon to be a reasonably exciting reality. As early as 2015 if Amazon is to be believed. Here is the idea: you place an order and a quad-copter thing flies it to your house. Pretty cool right? Here is a lovely picture:
Although I personally think it will be brilliant to have robots flying all over the place, I foresee a few problems with this:
It will only be for Prime customers. So it might be a fairly pricey object being delivered. Consequently it may be a target for ne’er-do-wells.
Even if it isn’t a target because of its perceived value, it still may have something fun inside it like a DVD or Bluray or whatever. Like a ‘mystery box’ of the air. People will try and shoot it down.
Even if it isn’t even carrying anything, people will try and take it down because people are just dicks. In Britain, they will try and take it down with stones or whatever. In America they have guns. In other countries they fire weapons in the air because they are happy/angry on a daily basis.
What if you live in a flat?
I can’t see me using this service very often myself. The main things I buy these days are books (delivered to my kindle through the internet), films (mostly downloaded legally or on Netflix) and games (download or Christmas gifts). The only thing I have delivered are Blurays, but with increasing bandwidths and cheaper cloud storage, I won’t even need that. But that’s just me.
However, I may change my tune if the following comes to pass. I am going to assume the drones will be able to zoom in on your mobile phone location as that is pretty damn easy to do. If this is the case and they deliver from their entire range then presumably I will be able to lie in a field on a summer’s day and with a tap of a finger can have a bottle of wine or a six-pack of ale delivered to my location. If that happens I will welcome this technology heartily.
Here is a clip:
