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> but drones are just inherently unsettling at some basic level. I'm not sure why I'll give two reasons, though doubtless there are more. 1. They add a third

• tshaddox 5y ago
  The privacy point may be somewhat valid, although 2-story houses in an average U.S. suburb already easily put most yards in view of neighbors' upper story windows. And any drone specifically used to spy on neighbors will either be relatively close and thus fairly loud and noticeable, or have nice camera gear that would already enable a lot of spying even without a drone (e.g. in upper story windows, again). The safety issue doesn't strike me as compelling. I don't think drones introduce much physical danger beyond, say, playing baseball in the neighborhood. Obviously if the sky became very crowded with delivery drones, or crash landings became at all common, this would be an obvious reason for heavy regulation, but I don't see this posing much of a danger.
  • babesh 5y ago
    I worry about falling drones. How far above ground did the drones fly? How fast were they flying? How heavy were they when you added payload? What material were the blades? Was there any protection or cushioning? Where do they intend to fly? Above streets or above homes or above sidewalks?
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      Worrying makes sense. I worry the same for much, much larger delivery airplanes that probably pass overhead multiple times per day. But there's a difference between worrying and outright opposing.
    • cma 5y ago
      Large commercial drones have parachutes.
      • pasttense01 5y ago
        I've been under the impression that it takes a considerable distance for parachutes to come into operation--while drones fly fairly close to the ground.
        • erik_seaberg 5y ago
          From what I’ve read, main parachutes are packed so that they open slowly, and BASE jumpers can design for a rough ride that starts below 200 feet. Maybe a drone could constantly drag an open chute because it’s not trying to get anywhere near terminal velocity?
  • imoverclocked 5y ago
    > or crash landings became at all common Many things can cause a drone to crash. Motor failure (from gunk/over-use/loss of power/birds/bugs/...) to unseen obstructions (eg: branches/power lines) to user error. My bet is that like all things Amazon, there will be a race to make everything as cheap as possible which includes the labor watching over the operation of individual drones. This makes the perfect recipe for balancing crash statistics with money invested... which means crash landings will become common. At some point, the question will be, "Is it cheaper to maintain a fleet of cheaply constructed drones or just replace them through attrition?"
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      I don't doubt that a delivery company would want to do things as cheaply as possible, but I also don't oppose regulations to prevent them from skimping on certain safety features. We do, for example, require Amazon delivery vehicles to follow all vehicle safety regulations (or, if there are cases where they're not enforced, they obviously ought to be). It might be reasonable to worry that delivery drones will suddenly take over cities before regulations can even be put in place (although that apparently hasn't happened yet). But it's not reasonable to assume that there's something unique about drones that will make them inherently more impervious to reasonable regulations and thus inherently much more dangerous than, say, existing delivery automobiles and airplanes. In fact, I would expect any remotely competent deployment of delivery drones would be much safer than the delivery automobiles they replace, simply due to the baseline accident rate of automobiles.
      • imoverclocked 5y ago
        > I also don't oppose regulations to prevent them from skimping on certain safety features. > I would expect any remotely competent deployment of delivery drones would be much safer than the delivery automobiles they replace, simply due to the baseline accident rate of automobiles. Why would you expect that a brand-new, mostly-unregulated technology would be safer than one that is over a century old with a lot of safety regulation in place? Even over the last several decades, safety regulation has reduced the per-mile as well as overall death rate of motor vehicles. [1] Regulation takes time and is often reactionary to large-scale problems. How do you expect to define a "remotely competent deployment of delivery drones" given the general lack of experience in doing so? Given the employee churn described in the article, do you think there is a culture of safety in this organization so deep that finding a fundamental+fatal flaw would be grounds for ceasing all drone-deliveries until the flaw is provably fixed? From the article: “There was a lot of decision making made in the moment without long term thought to it. It was almost slinging shit at the wall and hoping stuff would stick.” How can you justify better safety from something developed with constant engineering churn, short-term thinking and unreasonable time goals? [1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearly-snapshot#trends https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...
  • lumost 5y ago
    It's easier to understand typical politics concerns in the US through the lens of peoples dreams. A modest and common dream is to live in a place where you are free to do whatever you like in your yard without concern for neighbors e.g. A house in the woods/rural area. A simplification of that dream is to have fences in yard. If you remove a dream from possibility Americans will often react negatively even if the reality is that only a portion of them will achieve that dream in their lifetime.
    • tapland 5y ago
      I think that's a pretty universal reaction in that case.
    • brokenmachine 5y ago
      Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. - John Steinbeck
      • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
        Well, that and socialism sucks for the poor. But at least it also sucks for everyone else, too!
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    50 pound drone seems inherently more dangerous than a baseball.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Especially with spinning scythes. It's interesting tech, but a nightmare for the liability lawyers.
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      Inherently? I'm not so sure. Of course if you're going to get hit in the head by one at full speed, you might choose the baseball (although not a great choice either way). But if you're choosing between a competently-operated delivery drone delivering a package to your house, or children playing baseball in your backyard, I'd probably guess that the drone is less likely to cause injury or property damage.
      • akomtu 5y ago
        Well, drop a 50 lbs dumbbell on your car from 2nd floor and see what happens. Now if that thing falls on someone's kid running in the neighborhood...
        • maxerickson 5y ago
          And then you probably don't need a whole lot of drone deliveries to outnumber the kids playing neighborhood baseball. Kids around here are barely playing catch in their yards.
        • tshaddox 5y ago
          But when we say “inherently more dangerous” I assume we’re incorporating the likelihood of that actually happening. A dining room table dropping on a kid’s head would be very bad too, but we don’t generally think about tables as being “inherently dangerous.”
          • snovv_crash 5y ago
  • Talanes 5y ago
    The neighbor's window is a fixed consideration: you mentally map out who can see into your yard once and you're done. The possibility of a drone requires that mental calculation to be played out on a constantly repeated basis.
  • prometheus76 5y ago
    What about the danger of drones falling into streets, or dropping their payload into streets? Or windshields? Or onto people's heads? Think of gusts of wind. Think of a sudden rainstorm. Think of how rain changes the reflectivity of everything, making navigation much more difficult. Think of snow. Think of sprinklers. Think of a faulty battery dying. Think of batteries catching on fire midair, drone on fire dropping onto a home, or an apartment building. Think of the drone losing power midflight. The fact that they threw people at this means it was clearly a marketing tool, and not a serious engineering project.
• dheera 5y ago
  That privacy is already lost with renconaissance, you only just have the illusion of privacy. You always only owned the land, not the airspace above it.
  • boardwaalk 5y ago
    I never find this sort of argument convincing. There’s what’s legal and there’s the de facto circumstances. Yeah, can fly drones and peep in people’s windows right now, and that’s legal, but people don’t actually do that. Amazon has the actual money and logistics to indifferently blanket your neighborhood with noisy and nosy drones.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Privacy is and always has been an emergent legal construct to counter advances in surveillance and intrusion capabilities.
    • tremon 5y ago
      I'd rather formulate that as privacy is a fundamental concept, but its legal implementation is reactionary.
      • dredmorbius 5y ago
        That's similar in notion. Privacy is inherent in a nontechnical world, and created a set of practices and expectations generally. Yes, there could be an immediate intrusion by those sharing the same place and time, but improvements in information technology created an ever-growing set of methods to violate privacy remote in space, remote in time, and pervasive in both what it could perceive and record. If you look at how expanded notions of privacy developed, largely beginning in the 19th century (though with obvious precursors, see the US Bill of Rights and some earlier legal protections), those emerged in response to specific technological threats: printing and publishing, photography, telephony, improved optical sensing, recording, and increasingly over the past half century, digital monitoring, data storage, and analytic tools. There's a substantial if fractured literature on this, much of which begins by observing that there's no generally-agreed-on definition of privacy. "An emergent response" is my contribution to that. Warren & Brandeis, Solove, Nissenbaum, and Lepore are amongst the authors I've found useful.
• 12ian34 5y ago
  Not to alarm you, but I'm pretty sure that satellites can see you and your kids in your back yard - and they're taking pictures.
  • ElFitz 5y ago
    From what I’ve read, the highest commercially available satellite imagery is ~0.3m Which would make one’s head take up a whole pixel. Now, I don’t know what the best military satellites are capable of, but I’d wager there’s a reason many companies, governments, and armies still find airplanes and drones (and even blimps sometimes) very relevant today for ground imagery.
    • labster 5y ago
      Most “satellite” imagery is actually aerial photos taken from an airplane which can easily get to 10cm. At least on maps websites; local governments typically give away the imagery they pay for. Of course that’s not taken all the time, so it’s not exactly spying. We do have satellites that film the whole hemisphere constantly, but GOES only has 0.5km resolution or so — depending on latitude, of course.