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Monday, December 02, 2013

The Roads Will Roll! Or: No, Virginia, Amazon Will Not Launch the Drones

The always futurologically credulous intrawebs have wasted two days now numbskulls abuzz with Amazon's dumb dumb declaration that it might want to deliver packages via drone. Apart from inspiring a fine Atriosian reductio ad absurdum about FedEx announcing it means to start shipping by cannon and hoping for the best, we are none of us embiggened by indulging in this little ill-digested futurological episode. Of course, there is no such thing as AI, and Big Data + GPS isn't AI either, and once AI is out of the picture there's no reason to prefer tele-operated drones to, say, the usual vans or even bike messengers for that matter, who won't get permanently lost, can carry heavier weights, can respond intelligently on the ground to missed calls or curiously positioned doors or unexpected barriers to entry and the like. Needless to say, it would only take a few days of drone swarms banging into walls and one another to end such a ridiculous experiment, if the more likely enjoyment of tweens shooting the buggers out of the sky for kicks didn't keep the experiment from arriving at the swarm stage in the first place. Drone are avatars of "Technology" at the moment, and so the techbros are talking drone innovatorial synerjizz here there and everywhere. Robotically predictable. Nothing to see here, folks -- now or in... The Future!

1 comment:

Chad Lott said...

Companies that use roads, but don't think the government does anything for them are pretty funny.

I imagine Bezos as Doc Brown at the end of Back to the Future: "Where we're going, wed on't need roads"